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People need to do a little more investigating and ask a lot more questions before accepting a friend through their Facebook or MySpace account. That's the advice from two people who say either they or their friends have been deceived by someone online.
Kerri is on Facebook all the time. She has more than 200 friends. Recently she wanted to locate her old high school sweetheart. For a while, she thought she'd found him.
"I sent him a message to ask if it was (name withheld) from our high school and he said, ‘Yes,' and started talking to me," she said.
Problem is, it was the wrong man. Kerri found this out after a mutual friend gave her real high school boyfriend her phone number.
"I texted [him] back and said, ‘Well, I'm on Facebook right now. I'll just chat with you on Facebook,' and he replied that he isn't on Facebook and never has been," she said.
She confronted the impostor boyfriend, saying he wasn't who he claimed to be.
"When he responded, he basically sent me a three paragraph letter telling me what a horrible person I was and cussing me out and calling me every name in the book," she said.
She reported him to Facebook, which removed his account. But he came back and his messages became much more threatening.
"They were essentially telling me the type of person that he thought I was and that he should have raped me when he saw me last," she said. To be clear, Kerri never actually met this man.
While this was a case of mistaken identity that went bad, other people say their Facebook accounts are being hijacked altogether. Donna Lu Gamberg told Colorado news station KCNC she and a friend actually watched someone send an instant message through her account.
Gamberg said, "All of a sudden we both saw it. It popped up under my name and it said, ‘Yeah, I'm still here. What's going on?' I mean it gave me chills."
Some social media analysts say people wanting protection from Facebook are barking up the wrong tree.
Social Media Club of Salt Lake City Program Director Pete Codella said, "Facebook has kind of repeatedly taken the stance of they're not going to be the police of the Internet and they're not going to provide their data to the police who might need it."
Codella says people should ask a lot more questions of their friends searching for answers only their friends would know, and even Google search them.
Facebook says there is only so much it can do to prevent abuse.
As for Kerri, she says the threats have stopped, but there is still a threatening man out there who knows her name, which county she lives in and what she looks like.
E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com
