HELP is at hand for members of online communities who find themselves faced with suspicious requests from strangers to be accepted as a “friend”.
Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have spawned a new kind of nuisance. Spammers create realistic profile pages that make them look like ordinary users, and then persuade people to accept them as friends. This gives the spammers access to the victim’s inbox, which they flood with Viagra ads and pornography links.
The problem could overwhelm social networking sites. While there are filters that can distinguish spam emails from legitimate mail, it is hard to…
