Internet – Page 2 – Ramblings of a Monk

If you are like me, you do not want to accept a friend request from “blondegal17” simply because she adds that she “find you cute and want you to check out her profile and photo gallery” which happen to be off facebook. How do you determine if the friend request is geniune? There are many strategies, and here are my list:

10. If it is from “blondegal17”, “Michael18” or “Asian21” who happen to also have a link to a pay-to-enter photo gallery, stay off. Unless you are used to paying people to be your friends, I think it’s better to stay off.

9. If the requestor happen to indicate in his request that he is a banker, lawyer, tax-official, lottery-claims-agent, scientist, CEO, CFO, C-whatever-O, President, King or anyone who is helping to process unclaimed cash, and offers you a percentage for your trouble and assistance, click ignore and if you want to be a good
citizen, click “Block” and “Report”. Again, unless you have been staying in a cave and not heard of online scams or you really have some strong altruistic wish to ‘help’ someone offload millions of dollars in return for loosing thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, then carry on. Or if you are one of the above mentioned person, and just wish to link up with your fellow “banker, lawyer, tax-official, etc” … … you didn’t read this article, move along.

8. If the person’s account has no common friend and no activity at all, and the profile name reads “I_LOVE_YOURNAMEHERE” (Replace ‘YOURNAMEHERE’ with your name), then you should strong avoid the [ACCEPT] button, unless you are collecting stalkers.

7. Actually, if the person has no friends at all and no activity, you may also want to resist clicking [ACCEPT]. Seriously, what is the chance that this person conveniently added you out of the millions of facebook user. Oh, you want some stats, you little statistic-nazis? The chance is 1 out of “more than 400 million active users” ~= 0.00000025% http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

6. If the person just added 300 friends in the past hour … …

5. If the person just joined facebook 2 minutes and 27 seconds before adding you as a friend … … ok, you cannot really tell to that precision, but you get the drift. 😉

4. If the person’s profile photo looks like someone you know and that person already has a profile … …

3. If the person’s profile photo look like a celebrity … …

2. If the person’s profile photo returns a few hundred hits on http://www.tineye.com/ ^*

1. If the person’s profile photo look like me but is named something else other than “Chuan Guan Shi**” … …

So, how do you filter your friend request? Share here or in facebook. Oh and, lonelyhearts18, please don’t add me!

* http://www.tineye.com/ is a website where you can search for occurrences of images on the internet. Say, you have an invite or request from someone whose image is

http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/profile-ak-snc1/profile6/68/34/n123456789_1234.jpg , you copy this url into tinyeye website and it will search and return a list if any. I’ve spotted fake accounts this way quite effectively and these blocked accounts from sending me any more spam. If you happen to have a popular friend who is a star, model or public figure, your mileage may vary.

** It is actually “Shi Chuan Guan” but facebook being an U.S. firm, assumes that the whole worldly round uses the First Name, Last Name / Surname convention. In the Chinese culture, the family is more important than the individual (mostly anyway), and the naming convention of “Surname Given-Name” is suggestive of that.

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