Attractive profiles take on the dimensions of a daily and constant annoyance.
Don't wonder any more. Your Facebook profile picture is not attractive enough to attract the opposite sex on such a high and... international level. Behind the seductive profiles that frantically chase you on a daily basis is not the vision from... Ukraine knocking on your online door. Rather, danger is lurking and the whole effort is a well-orchestrated scam with money as the ultimate goal.
As explained in detail to ethnos.gr by Theophanis Kasimis, a cybersecurity consultant, these Facebook accounts that constantly make regular users friend requests are "handmade" and created so that Facebook cannot block them. Specifically he states: "These profiles are as I'm sure most people realise are fake. Perpetrators have found new ways to approach users and as a result, they can even be targeted, victims of sexual intimidation.
The... Ukrainian widowed engineer you just met on Facebook is probably a fraud. New research shows that there are many scammers on dating sites, who usually compose profiles of Ukrainian, Nigerian and Asian women in order to convince their would-be... partners, after a correspondence process, to send them money.
And not only. Usually these profiles are mostly created manually by the perpetrators for better results since the countermeasure systems of most social networks block and delete the creation of automatic mass profiles.
Their purpose, apart from deceiving would-be partners and extorting money from them, is to disseminate pornographic content from websites they maintain themselves. The more clicks users click on, the more money they earn."
However, in recent days it seems that the popular social network can detect them quickly as some of these profiles are soon deleted and when you click on them they give an error message.
But how can users protect themselves? As Mr. Kasimis says, "in such cases the public is called upon not to respond and to take some basic protective measures, such as:
To block the suspicious profile
To send a request either through the Police, or through the CyberEthics Organization, to delete and "block" the perpetrator's account
Not to respond by sending any amount of money.
Do not respond to e-mails or video calls from unknown persons at all