Saturday, June 13, 2009

Unsafe on the net

I always get tons of friend-requests and chat-requests in Orkut, Facebook and Gtalk, but I am an "I don't add strangers" kind of a person. There was a time when I used to talk to people, but over a period of time I understood it is a complete waste of time, money and energy. But one recent friend-request caught my attention, it said, "I will always be a stranger unless you talk to me!" So, talk to strangers so that he doesn't remain one? WTH?
This guy has been sending constant requests and his gmail id reads akash... sumthing sumthing @gmail. Now, as far as my memory goes, I never had many friends whose names were Akash. Although it is a very common name, in my life I have met only three Akashs', one was an office colleague at Hindustan Times Patna, another was a school friend and the third worked with me at MetroNow. I was sure I did not know this one. He kept on sending me requests and I kept denying them, wicked me.
Finally when I got the nth number request, I thought I should accept and see who the bugger was. I did and lo! I knew this person. I kept cursing myself, how could I forget everything about a friend who seemed to remember every single detail about me. It was so sweet of him. He then started telling me how much he is in touch with our common friends and that he has been tracking all that I do. He had each and every detail about me engraved in his mind. He kept talking and somewhere in the back of my mind I could not relate whatever he was saying.
I then started scrutinising, asking him things that all my friends know, but were not there on the community sites. I said, "Oh! You remember when we used to study when we were kids?" He got a little stuck, but nonetheless replied with crossed fingers, "Yah! Doon was a wonderful place." And I said, "Gotcha!! I have never even visited Doon school." He got flustered and started blabbering. When I asked from where he got my email id, he said "maybe from orkut". My next question had to be: what's your id there. To this he said, "I'm not there on orkut. I sometimes go there through my friend's id and get to know about different people."
This still did not clear one doubt: Where he got my id from? After much debate he disclosed that he copies emails from forwarded mails and then through a fake orkut id checks different profiles and enacts being a very close friend. So this is what this smart ass has been doing. Coping email ids from forwarded mails, searching them on the net, acting to be a close friend and then maybe finally even meeting up with those he succeeds to mislead. I was lucky enough and hope you will be careful with such jerks. I can just hope. Nah?