What's up with this, Facebook?

Annamaria on Monday

There may be the beginnings of a thriller plot in something that has been happening to me.  The movie or the book might be called The Facebook Conspiracy.

Almost all writers I know use Facebook to promote their work.  Our publishers urge us to do this so we can interact with our readers and use the connections to promote each new book as it comes along.  With each of my books, my publisher sent me a questionnaire that asked, among other things, how many friends Annamaria Alfieri had on Facebook.

The number went up every year.  These days, I get new friend requests just about every day.  I am happy to connect with these new people, so for a long while I automatically accepted any friend request I received.

That is until about eighteen months ago, when something weird started happening.  I started to get friend requests from men, who--the instant I accepted them--private messaged me to tell me how beautiful I am and how desperate they were to get to know me better.

I found this creepy in the extreme.  There are hundreds of millions of women more attractive than I on Facebook.  On top of which my Facebook page clearly states that I am married.  These would-be friends would have had no way of knowing that, in reality, I no longer have a husband.  What did they hope to achieve by flattering me in such a way?  I could not imagine it was anything nice.  After a couple of these experiences, I began examining the profiles of people before I accepted their offer of friendship.  I began to suspect that some of the people approaching me were using fake identities. Let me show you the evidence:

Profile of the impersonator:  Male, divorced/widowed, often military, lives in another state/country/continent, well-educated, has very few or no other friends on Facebook, displays few pictures of himself--almost all in a professional capacity, and quite a few of them have the same woman (Victory Crane) as a friend.  I am not accusing her of anything.  She may be just another target.

Here are screen shots of such offers of friendship that I received between May 24 and May 26 this year:

Yes, it is typical for me to receive five of these in a three-day period, which is one of the reasons I am talking about it.  It really creeps me out.  So much so that I reported the activity to Facebook.  The answer came back that the people in question were legitimate subscribers.  No help from that quarter.

I must say, though, creepy as I find all this, I did get one offer that made me laugh out loud.  Here it is:

Really?  I am supposed to believe that this guy is the architect of that building?   HAHAHA! 

If I wrote contemporary thrillers, I would write one with the following plot:  Woman in her sixties finds herself living alone for the first time in her life.  Her husband's tragic illness has destroyed the happy life she had.  For a living, she writes code for a voice-over-internet provider and works from home.  She is lonely and could be vulnerable to people who are trying to impose on her.  Out of the blue, she begins to receive offers like the ones above.  At first, she accepts offers of Facebook friendship from attractive men who live far away, thinking that a little minor-league internet flirting couldn't hurt.  She does that with a few of these men.  But then she begins to suspect that they are out to hurt her in some way.  When she tries to find out if her suspicions are correct, she gets no help from Facebook.  So she uses her computer skills to try to dig into what is behind all this.  At first what she finds leads her to believe that there are more than three people behind the false faces on her computer screen.  She suspects a financial scam of some sort, because money does come up in the posts from them on her Facebook page.  Eventually, she uncovers a shadow world, playing the background of Facebook, where a ring of underworld international arms dealers use unsuspecting women's Facebook pages to pass coded messages to one another.  One of the men who has friended her and watches her Facebook page turns out to be a French BRGE spy (Brigade de renseignement et de guerre électronique).  He eventually he sees that she has misunderstood the danger.  When she decides to trap the miscreants, he must interfere to save her.