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How to Zap the Scammers

One good idea is to decline their friend request.  They go away and stop bothering you.  Problem solved.  But of course that leaves them free to scam other people, not all of whom will spot them for scammers.  So I like to zap them, hurt their business, waste their time and make them feel like dirt.  Hey, not all heroes wear capes.

You want to know how? Okay, go to their profile, and tell Facebook that they are fake accounts.  Mr and Mrs Facebook have got much better at deleting fake accounts in the last month or two, probably because they have had adverse publicity.  Click on the More menu - the circle with three dots


Select Give feedback or report this profile
Press the button marked Fake Account, and SEND


Click Submit to Facebook for review
Tick the box marked "I believe this goes against Facebook's Community standards"
(I'm pretty sure that trying to scam me out of a $200 iTunes card is against community standards)






Give it a few minutes, and you should see that they have been zapped!  You might have to refresh your screen.  Gotcha!




If you have a few minutes, and assuming that the scammer has a distinctive name, it's worth searching Facebook for that name.  (The scammers very often give themselves an unusual name - possibly because their native language is not English, or possibly because they go online and pick a surname and forename at random.)  There is your scammer, with a few blank profiles of the same name.  Repeat the above process for the blanks.  Your scammer wakes up in Ghana and discovers that overnight Facebook has cleared out all his fake accounts.

Well done!

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