Tonight I received my first SPAM message on Facebook. I had 1 new unread message and was putzing around when I went to read it and saw that  I now had TWO messages...

I clicked into my Inbox and my heart sank...

The Inbox view only showed the first line or two, but that was certainly enough. This is the first time I've seen one that referenced the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, but the details are not the important part.

The important part is that these fucking scammers are starting to infiltrate Facebook. I suppose it was only a matter of time. They've made using Hotmail or Yahoo mail practically unusable. Hotmail at least has the 'exclusive' setting so that only people in your contacts/address book can  actually send messages through to your inbox, but I've had to abandon my Yahoo email account that I've had since 1997 because it gets about 50-60 emails a day, most of it various forms of the Nigerian 419 Scam. The sad part is that even now, in 2008 people are STILL FALLING FOR THIS CRAP. There are various names for it, I know it as a 419 scam because that's what The Register called it when I used to read that. They had a whole section on 419 scam-baiters each week it seemed. There's another one about a lottery going around to and even my mother nearly fell for, forwarding it to me to ask me if I thought it was legit. As if.

This is a pretty serious thing for Facebook, and I hope they figure out some way to nip it in the bud. The whole point of a social networking site is, well, to NETWORK. Meet new people. If everyone starts jacking up their privacy settings to the point that you can't contact anyone unless you're already friends, how are you going to get to be friends?

As soon as I saw it, I looked for and found the "report message" link right there underneath this scumbag's name. It came up with a warning that if I proceeded, the person would be put on my block list and any relationships I had with that person would be broken. The two choices were Spam or Harassment. I kind of flipped out a little bit and vented at the poor administrator who has to open that message. The next popup (remember when THOSE were the scourge of the internet?) said that the message would be forwarded to Facebook administration and that I would not be informed if any action was taken.

Unfortunately, this sets up Facebook staff for a never ending game of Whack-a-mole, where these scumbags who have nothing better to do than sit in internet cafes in Nigeria and create fake user ids and email addresses and send their spam out.