Saturday, November 13, 2010

Facebook Solution {Warn the other Friends}

Grandpa Cliff teaches Peter in the shop

My cousin, Ryan, suggested that I post a warning on the former Facebook friend's wall, alerting his/her other friends about her true (or false) identity.  I agree that the other potential victims should be warned.
But the page of the former friend doesn't allow for posts, only for messages.

In order to warn the other friends, I sent each of them a message, warning them about the fraudulent identity of our common friend.  This was a time consuming process, and involved opening up each page of a mutual friend, hitting "send a message to ______" and cut & pasting the message about my discovery.

Here are a few of the replies I received before I had contacted everyone on the false friend's page:


  • She has tried communicating with me but virtually everything like that out of africa comes from Nigeria.
  • Thank you, Bridget! I have suspected this for some time once the money requests started, but in charity hoped that I was wrong. I did mail her one of my books (expensive to Uganda!), but I just pray that it got into someone's hands who could use it, so no big loss. Thank you for researching this and contacting me!  God bless!
  • Thank you so much!!!!! WOW, some people!! 
  • Thank you Bridget for letting us know. We appreciate this information. We thought something wasn't right when this person started asking for money as soon as she became a friend. In our hearts, we felt this was not a genuine need. Thank you again.  Blessings.
I got quite a surprise as I attempted to send a message to the next friend on his/her list.  A pop up from Facebook read:

Block!  You are engaging in behavior that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users.  You have been blocked from sending messages because you repeatedly misused this feature. This block will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. When you are allowed to reuse this feature, please proceed with caution. Further misuse may result in your account being permanently disabled. For further information, please visit our FAQ page. 
Kind of ironic, isn't it?  I've been blocked from sending warnings to the friends of a fraud!
Guess I'll have to find a different hobby.



1 comment:

Ryan O'Donnell said...

I didn't think of this until now, but Facebook should probably know about this and might even prosecute. For example, http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=152619334773531&id=31987371885