Considering that it's still the season for summer internship and job recruitment/interviews, you may want to be especially careful about who you friend on Facebook.A few weeks ago, I received a friend request from someone named Jasika Roberts claiming to be Princeton '10 and from the Princeton, NJ area. She and I had over 30 mutual friends. I accepted the request to see if her information would yield clues to how I or any of my friends knew her. I didn't find much, so I searched Princeton Facebook and the directory to discover that she didn't actually exist. The closest match I found was a Hilary J. Roberts who the directory has listed as "Undergraduate Class Withheld". (Some quick research led me to a Club Swimming page where she was listed playing for Harvard (not related to Jasika, but the University may want to follow up on that ... ))
This morning, I got another friend request from Chloe Barnwell (also claiming to be Princeton '10). She was friends with most of my friends from Charter, so I searched the faceboard and found nothing. Later, I did a general internet search, Princeton directory and Princeton Facebook search and found nothing as well.
I think this might be the an employer tactic to get access to your profile, spam, or just some market research group creating a fake identity (they know you won't deny a friend request from a pretty girl). She looks real enough, right? Interestingly enough, most of my friends who accepted Jasika's friend request were male, while Chloe, who didn't have a Facebook photo had an even number of my male and female friends accepting her request.
Though I doubt it, if you're not concerned about jobs or internships, this could also be a ploy by Public Safety or the Princeton Police Department to catch you drinking or serving minors in your pictures. Check out what they did only a few months ago (and are still doing?) over at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
— Tasnim Shamma '11
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7 comments:
she friend requested me and accepted thinking it would yield clues to her identity. it didn't and i immediately de-friended her
It's more than likely that it's just marketing/spam companies trying to gather as much info as possible. I've been getting these types of friend requests for a while now on all of my networks.
Interesting... Nice article, I've been noticing a lot of these random request lately. I have a feeling it's just spam - albeit Princeton-specific spam.
An easy way to tell if they're really Princeton students? Simply check to see if they're in the Princeton network, which requires an email confirmation from an @princeton.edu address. Anyone can write "Princeton '10" but spammers cannot just join a network.
We should all click the report button on these kind of profiles, that'll show 'em :P
I dunno if this is accurate but according to someone who posted about this on PrincetonFML it's the police who are doing it.
Uh... her birthday is listed as 1984. That would make her 26 when she graduates this June. That's a pretty big tipoff that she's not the average Princeton student.
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