My burner Facebook account got a weird message tonight

[Dan Druff]

I have a fake Facebook account I use to browse things. You may not know this, but when you browse someone on Facebook, they may get a "people you may know" friends suggestion of you, which can be awkward if it's an old girlfriend or classmate you just want to look at, but don't really want to make any connection.

For this reason, I made a fake Facebook with a random picture and a random name, so this way I can maintain privacy browsing people's profiles. I don't use it that often -- only as necessary. I don't ever message anyone or post anything with it.

Well, I got a message from a woman tonight, and I had to determine whether her story was real.

Here were her claims:

- She has been looking for a guy she used to date, who has the exact same name as my fake account.

- The guy in my picture (which she assumed was me) looks a lot like the guy she used to date.

- The guy she's looking for was her boyfriend when she was 14-15 way back in 1989-1990. Both of them are now 45.

- She's from Illinois, just as she was back then, and wants to know if I'm the same dude.


It's important to know that I did NOT use the pic of any guy with the same name. I grabbed a random pic from somewhere (I forget where), and I made up a random name. The two are not associated at all, so if this guy looks like the one she dated years ago, it's a coincidence (or she's lying/engaging in wishful thinking).

Before I tell the rest, I'll ask you to guess two things:

1) Is it a scammer?

2) Did I pretend to be this dude, or admit right away that I'm not him, and that this is a burner account?

[jsearles22]

No

Yes

[Reno]

Yes

No

[Walter Sobchak]

Yes

Yes

[IamGreek]

Yes and yes

[Baron Von Strucker]

get some nudes and post em, give her DR's number sit back and enjoy.

[lol wow]

i want in on the ground floor nft of you blowing this guy like can we do 17k friends and family price here

[hardeight]

no
yes

[Walter Sobchak]

get some nudes and post em, give her DR's number sit back and enjoy.

It'll be the best sex she's ever had.

[d1sposition]

get some nudes and post em, give her DR's number sit back and enjoy.

It'll be the best sex she's ever had.

OR...

[Jayjami]

Sending her a dick pic is pretty much mandatory at this point.

[Walter Sobchak]

Sending her a dick pic is pretty much mandatory at this point.

After you get her to send nudes first.

[dwai]

it's jewdonk reverse cat fishing you

[Sloppy Joe]

LOL at being 50 and having a Facebook burner for stalking purposes. Normal!

[limitles]

yes yes and yes

[limitles]

get some nudes and post em, give her DR's number sit back and enjoy.

It'll be the best sex she's ever had.

[Crowe Diddly]

just snap it off clean.

[YUUP]

Yes

No

Whatever.

Druff , we all know you better than to think this happened last night .

No limit hold em games at 5 am ?

[Dan Druff]

LOL at being 50 and having a Facebook burner for stalking purposes. Normal!

Was waiting for a miserable troll sniffing my butthairs to make a comment like this.

I hate to tell you, but in the real world, people are curious about others from their past -- especially people around my age who haven't seen old classmates or ex-girlfriends in a few decades. Perhaps you had no friends or girlfriends back in high school or college and have no desire to look anyone up, but the rest of us tend to be curious. Anyone who has a Facebook account and denies having looked up others from their past (without friending them) is lying.

So you have two choices. You can either let Facebook do its creepy data collection thing and suggest you as a friend, and then have the awkwardness of either accepting or rejecting this person you really don't want to interact with, or you can use a burner account so that data is never collected.

Most people have no idea that Facebook operates this way, and in fact are really creeped out when I tell them that it does this.

LOL @ calling it "stalking" to look up others' public Facebook profiles. Pathetic.

[Dan Druff]

Anyway, this did really happen last night.

Despite the obejctions of sensitive Portland soyboy Sloppy Joe, I'll give you guys the rest of the story.

Of course my mind immediately went to "scam", as I get the occasional random message from a "female" on my regular account, and it's almost always a Nigerian scammer playing the part of a hot chick, who of course desperately needs me to send "her" money. Often these scam accounts are direct copies of real Facebook profiles, so they appear real at first glance, though have a curious absence of real-life friends commenting on their posts.

Anyway, this person didn't write very well, which also made me think "scam", as that's often a telltale sign of foreign scammers.

However, after I asked a few questions, she went into a long diatribe about the guy she was looking for, and I wasn't so sure. The story was very detailed. It involved a small city in Illinois, whereas most scammers like to talk about being from "Philadelphia" or "New York", and are light on details. The story itself also didn't lend itself well to scamming. If she was pretending to have known me from the past, how was this suppsoed to translate into money? Wouldn't the victim know that they never knew this person?

Most telling, she sent her picture (without my asking for it), and was a very average looking woman in her mid-40s. That especially made it seem real, because most of the romance scammers tend to use pictures of hot chicks, not plain Janes in their 40s.

She then told me what was somewhat of a sad story of having been in love with this guy in "1989 and 1990", when they were both 14-15. She claimed he felt the same way about her, but his family moved to Missouri. She claimed to have gotten permission to move with his family and live with them (!!), but her mom wouldn't let her, and that was that.

I felt bad for her when she then remarked, "I have loved him every day since then, and have been looking for him."

I tried to bring her back down to earth by noting that this guy might be "very different now than what you remember in 1990", and that he also might be married with a family. She was undeterred and still wanted to find him. Apparently the fake pic I chose happened to somewhat resemble the guy, and the name was identical. Oops.

By this point, I was 100% certain that she was real.



Now time for another question:

This woman didn't seem very sophisticated or computer savvy. She seemed to just be a simple woman from small town Illinois, who never left the town where she grew up. Her attempts to "find" this old flame were limited to using Facebook search.

Did I offer to help her find this long, lost love for her? Or did I politely end the conversation?