Okay, I will let this go soon.
But I wanted to get the word of Facebook’s shameful practices of allowing fake profiles to be created for scamming purpose and their opaqueness of reporting processes. SO I re-wrote my previous catfishing posts into a new article onto the Big Stage of Medium.com:
Timothy Boostrom is Not Real
How Facebook provides a nurturing home for catfishing scammers
I am not hopeful it will do anything. Some nice people will comment, and recommend and then go back to debating stars and hearts. Meanwhile, the cat fishing scammers continue to multiple like horny rabbits in Facebook, there are likely hundreds of fakes using the same photo of me in their profile, many romance scam victim are having their hearts toyed with and their pocketbooks pilfered– and Facebook remains close, opaque, and silent.
If that’s a system you support or look askance to, oh well.
I won’t.
I want an answer.
Frankly I don’t really care if they never give me my account back — the scammers took revenge, reported me as impersonating someone else, and my account is clocked out pending whatever magic eight-ball Facebook uses to investigate.
But try this on.
You get an email from someone telling a story how they fell in love with someone they met online, sent that person money for maybe a plane ticket so they could finally meet, or money to help them get out a bad loan. Only by a reverse image search do they start to see their reality crumble, and find you online. And you start to get more messages of how people are creating fake profiles on Facebook (and also LinkedIn) where you see strange names of people who have your photo in their profile.
Would you be bugged? What if you went through some arcane reporting process, where nameless Facebook employees email you responses that say these profiles do not violate their so-called Community Standards?
And then you get an email from “Facebook” closing your account and accusing you of impersonating someone else?
Would you shrug it off? I hope not.
There are real victims of cat-fishing, and Facebook does not care.
FB coddles more than cat-fishers. I’d like a hashtag for that too
Over a year ago, a page I owned, developed and managed for over four years got clocked out by a similar strategy, the concerted action of revenge takers complaining to Facebook ~ or maybe just the aggrieved rounding up a few friends.
I got an email notifying me that FB was taking the page down, would not get involved and for me to contact the complaining party or parties, etc. Except they wouldn’t respond to repeated requests for a name or contact information.
I started another page. The experience was edifying and on some level even liberating. I’m still mad at Facebook, probably more than with the instigators because FB could/should have behaved better but would not.