Spooky imposter tries to create a Facebook double of me
Someone out there knows a lot about me. Enough that they tried to create a FB account which was identical to mine and claimed to my FB friends that my old account had been hacked and they needed to rebuild it from scratch. They knew enough to ask Gpaul, Caroline, Sara, Bliss and my new friend Mahmoud to refriend me.
how do we know that people on the screen are who they claim to be?
But of course they did not know enough to know that several of these friends would find this request odd and and wrote me back about it. And what they really did not know, and i did not know, is once FB identifies you as a fraud, how completely all records of your behavior vanish.
To be clear this is someone who as trying to start a FB account with the name i am currently using Paxus Occupy Calta-Star. Now there are lots of identical names out there – so that in itself cant be enough to tip off the FB robot identity police – even though a real human looking at this weird name existing twice in the same town would suspect something, it is probably too much for the FB artificial intelligence to spot that clue.
But once FB figured this out, my efforts to search into this imposters behavior were vanished. Mahmoud had a chat session with this person, but FB went in and eliminated all the imposters comments once it had made that determination. People who had gotten friend requests that they did not respond to yet went back to look at them and found them gone.
My profiles are public, so it is easy enough to get some information about me. You could steal FB pictures to help build a profile. But what could they have hoped to get out of it?
Angie asked if i was flattered or freaked out. i said neither, but i would get a blog post out of it. “That is how i know this is the real you” she replied.
10 responses to “Spooky imposter tries to create a Facebook double of me”
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- - November 16, 2012
your passport to complaining 
I got the same type of friend request from “Tony” a few hours later. Someone is pretending to be Twin Oakers?
So i vote for entrapment and capturing data. Accept the friend request from the imposter. Engage them in dialog pretending that they are who they claim to be.
Lead them on, try to gether information from them, see how much they know. Then pull the plug on them after sharing the info with who ever they are impersonating (if they want that).
This is the same approach you took with the Jehovah’s Witnesses! 🙂
Oh, i have changed my passwords of course
I also got the fake friend request from your doppelganger. The jack-booted thugs are going to have to do better if they really want to infiltrate our social webs.
laughing very hard at the closing lie of your post!
“like” to Angie’s comment! 🙂 I, too, got a friend request from your would-be doppelganger.
I have a friend request from you, too. Do you have anyone accepting the friend request to see what this imposter is trying to do?
Dearest JayBird:
i think Facebook may have finally done something about this, so when you try to friend Paxus Occupy Calta-Star (i have dropped the Occupy in my real profile) see if you can engage him. He (or his bot identity) was trying to get people to take “free” laptops which cost $400 in shipping. Good luck keep me posted.
Paxus in Holland
Black Friday 2013