Complete strangers are constantly being “added” as friends on various social networks. Some users easily accept all requests, while others, on the contrary, carefully study the stranger’s profile and in most cases leave him as a subscriber.
Some people really want to meet everyone, but more often than not, outsider profiles have their own goals, which may not be very pleasant.
How did the snowball start?
Recently, just during the second period, a stranger with a name in Latin came knocking on my Facebook page. I approved the request without looking.
A couple of minutes later, another foreigner asked to be a friend, I also added him. After this, requests for men with non-European appearance began to grow like a snowball. Without exaggeration - in geometric progression! That is, I closed the social network for about half an hour, and when I opened it, I found 30-50 requests. So that they would not “hang”, I approved them. And everything was repeated, but on an even larger scale.
The fact is that the creators of Facebook provided tools to push users to become friends with more people. The profiles of your friends’ friends loom intrusively in front of you with the prompt “You may know them.” Seeing the avatar of a girl with a Cyrillic name among “their” friends, foreigners thought: “Yeah, that means she’ll add me too,” and knocked on the door.
Why are strangers added as friends on VKontakte?
In recent decades, the main invention of mankind has been social networks, which have significantly changed the psychology of communication between people. If previously only those with whom they were in direct contact were called friends, today the number of friends on social networks exceeds all acceptable limits.
Why add strangers, and what is such friendship? This question has puzzled sociologists around the world.
In the virtual world there are no geographical boundaries, so you can accept people as friends even from the other side of the planet.
If you open your list of VKontakte subscribers, you will see that some of the people on the list are complete strangers. Why do they want to be friends with strangers and why do they need it? After all, often such individuals do not even try to communicate.
Virtual friendship is significantly different from friendship in the real world. True friends are those with whom you spend your free time, communicate often and constantly keep in touch.
And virtual friends are less demanding, because they don’t need constant attention. Such friendship does not require communication.
In addition, trying to get acquainted can cause a negative reaction.
There are several reasons why a stranger wants to subscribe to updates:
- Your page is interesting. A stranger likes your posts and wants to follow your news feed.
Such friendship does not oblige you to anything, so you don’t even have to respond to comments and messages.
- The person knows you.
Thanks to social networks, you can find a childhood friend, classmate or distant relative.
In this case, VKontakte helps to establish communication with people whose connection has been interrupted for some reason.
- Unfortunately, most often a stranger offers to be friends, pursuing only personal gain. Often among such people there are scammers who begin to offer various products or openly extort money.
Often the stranger pursues selfish goals. He invites you to join groups and offers various products or trips. A user can talk long and persistently about his cool business on the Internet, thanks to which he can earn, for example, two thousand dollars in 2 hours.
By advertising such a business, they are trying to recruit you, but in fact it is an ordinary financial pyramid in which you can become a victim.
It can be difficult to get rid of the most persistent scammers, because even after they are blacklisted on VKontakte, they can find a person on another social network.
As you know, advertising is the engine of trade, so strangers want to have as many friends as possible. This helps increase the number of views, and perhaps someone will take the bait.
The more subscribers, the more valuable the page is considered. There are sites with certain tasks that require participants to have a large number of subscribers.
By adding such a stranger, you will receive spam as a gift, offers to join groups or dubious earnings.
Some use their page to advertise a product. For example, a beautiful girl has a large number of subscribers, and by posting her product, she guarantees it a lot of views.
An adult user has the right to decide independently whether to add a stranger as a friend or not. But parents should monitor their child’s page in order to protect them from scammers and various swindlers who come up with new ways of deception every day.
When personal messages are harmless only at first glance
After about a day, I began to get tired of this, and I began to reject new requests. But there were no fewer of them. In addition, personal messages appeared with some bouquets, cats, emoticons, compliments and greetings in English and auto-translated Russian. I opened the first messages, then deleted them without looking, in order to clear my history and not miss important correspondence with colleagues and friends.
I asked only one question - what is the purpose of these people if my profile shows “married” status, and Facebook, as an international network, translates this status into the languages of different users? A little later you will find out what these people needed.
Meanwhile, not only people with names in Latin, but also in Arabic, began to ask me to be friends.
Why are strangers added?
It is convenient to communicate in this social network, since the number of contacts is not limited; they can be divided into groups, creating albums for each of them. This is used by people who need VK communication not to ask how you are doing. Their goal is to expand their audience to do the following:
- offer goods or services;
- offer membership in various thematic communities and groups.
From a logical point of view, there is nothing wrong with this - he is engaged in trade or is looking for new clients. But there is one important disadvantage in all this: after adding to you, if the page is hidden, he gets access to your contact list. He may start spamming them the same way he spams you, which will cause a negative reaction from his friends. Therefore, it is better to refrain from adding people you do not know personally as friends.
On a note!
VK can be separately hidden from all specific people.
Facebook timeline that's embarrassing
Realizing that I was not responding to personal messages, people unknown to me from Egypt and Syria began posting postcards on my wall (on my timeline, in Facebook terms) with text that translated means something like “thank you for accepting friendship.” .
I was already worried about my business reputation - I have many colleagues as friends on Facebook who could see this. My sons are on the cover, the avatar is also decent, and the whole wall is covered in postcards from the “macho man” from Damascus. I deleted these pictures and blocked the senders.
As you can imagine, by this point I had already regretted a million times that I started adding everyone. It should be noted here that all the events described occurred within one and a half to two days. That is, I have not yet managed to understand what it all means. After all, I was not online all the time and reacted in between main tasks.
How did the husband react?
At dinner, I complained to my wife about the flow of strange people, and my beloved said: “Remove them! Some of them live in Syria. Everything on the profile is in Arabic, you don’t understand what’s written there. Maybe he’s a terrorist, and you’re his friend.”
Unfortunately, by that time there were already 400 unfortunate friends, and I was horrified to think how much time I would spend on cleaning. Creating a new account is also not an option - here I have all the necessary contacts, correspondence, memories, communities.
I Googled how to delete unnecessary “friends” in bulk. I realized that there is no simple way. Even if you download a special browser extension, you still need to manually group your extra friends into a list. That is, in the end it’s all the same to point at everyone.
In general, I abandoned this idea for a while, because I didn’t have free time that evening. But I was wrong - then something happened that I found time.
Account promotion
Social networks have long turned into an effective tool for advertising and earning money. Many people create profiles or groups, gain a huge following, and then attract advertisers or simply sell these pages. Even if there is no explicit advertising in the profile, there may be links to different sites with educational topics (and advertising, in turn, is already on these sites).
By adding complete strangers, page owners create an influx of users and provide an audience for advertisers. For example, a VKontakte group with about 20 thousand subscribers can be sold for 5-10 thousand rubles (depending on the composition of the audience).
Of course, the direct sale of accounts on social networks is not advertised, but there are a huge number of sites and forums on the Internet dedicated to advertising and website promotion. SMM and SEO specialists, marketers and other people are constantly buying and selling accounts.
What does all this mean for the average user? “Friendship” with an unknown page or subscribing to a group does not obligate you to anything; you will not be directly offered any product or service. In essence, such pages simply “hang” without meaning among your friends or communities, so many try to get rid of them.
The most terrible thing that became the last straw
Almost immediately after this, something happened that made me spend half the night manually deleting every foreigner, just to get rid of it forever.
It turns out that Facebook has a video calling option. My smartphone beeped unusually, and I saw a call from someone with a foreign name. I was surprised by such impudence - I don’t even call people I know via video without first agreeing in correspondence
Well, I ignored the call, and Zhenya said: “Next time, give me the phone!”
Not even 10 minutes had passed when another video call rang out. I gave the smartphone to my husband and went to the nursery. According to Zhenya, a naked (!) man was sitting on the other side of the screen and was performing characteristic actions.
When Zhenya told me this, I thought that I would die of shame that I, such an uneasy person in life, did not turn on query filtering in time and ran into this nightmare.
Commerce
This version of “dating” is similar to the previous one, but in this case the person no longer hides his intentions. As a rule, advertising accounts contain some information about their services or products. Even in a personal message, an “attractive” advertising offer often comes immediately.
More advanced accounts try to look like ordinary users; they have a completely ordinary page that does not arouse suspicion. Only then, after gaining subscribers, do they begin to post advertising texts or other similar information from time to time. In general, there is no harm from these pages, but their benefit is also very doubtful.
Why do foreigners add Russian girls as friends?
And then the purpose of all these requests gradually began to dawn on me, and Zhenya also explained it to me. Yes, this is not “recruitment,” as Zhenya suggested earlier. This is virtual perverted video communication with women who are not similar in mentality to women from the countries where these horny men live. Most likely, their women wear closed clothes and do not surf the Internet, so these people knock on the door of Russians for virtual communication.
Foreigners don’t look at any status – it doesn’t matter to them at all: you’re married or actively searching. These people knock on the door of everyone with Cyrillic names - maybe some inattentive person (like me) will approve the request.
How to Remove Recently Added Friends from Facebook
After this, despite the lack of time, I began to clear my list of friends. Luckily, Facebook has a “Recently Added” button when you open your friends list.
If you click on it, these people do not walk interspersed with normal friends, but in a row.
While I was manually deleting each one, they sent me several more messages in private. But one of them was no longer flowers and cats, but a porn photograph. I thought I was going to be sick (even though I’m a fully grown woman).
I started clearing the list so quickly that I forgot to take screenshots for this post. Having finally deleted the last Arab friend and rechecked my list of friends, I exhaled. Zhenya took this story with humor and still sometimes makes fun of my naivety.
