By DAN MAY

Baffling!

Okay, so it seems that the latest Facebook scam is where you get a private message from one of your friends and it begins like this:

“Hi…I actually got another friend request from you yesterday…”

It’s supposed to make you think YOUR site has been cloned, when in actuality it is the person who SENT the message whose site has been compromised. What’s confusing about it, among other things, is their page has NOT been cloned, but commandeered, because the previous messages in the message thread are ACTUAL past messages from your friend. And if you search their name, only one of them comes up, where if they had been cloned, there would be multiple sites with their picture and name.

Confused?

So am I.

So, what’s the point of this scam? I’m not sure, but it seems to be designed to create mistrust in the whole system. Because if someone can commandeer our site and start sending out private messages to our friends WITHOUT actually cloning our site, then the foundation of privacy has been destroyed. And as I’m typing this message, I just got another of the exact same message from another friend.

They’re dropping like flies.

So, is the objective of the people behind this scam to tell us that now we can’t trust anything we see on Facebook, even when it comes from our ACTUAL friends? That everything is under suspicion, everything is under scrutiny and we have to be careful what we say and what we do? And that no one, but no one is really our friend online? That it’s all a facade designed to take our attention away from the REAL world and REAL human beings? Is that the objective? Because if it is, I think they’ve wasted their time.

Because in our hearts, we already knew that.