You've got a friend in me????

I hate to throw anything negative out during this holiday season but here goes......
A warning to all my elderly vulnerable widow girl friends and maybe even male friends:  there are folks out there who troll the Internet for people like you and me in hopes they may score a target.  Yes, there are risks to being out there on the Internet!  Yes, I know that but not until I broadcast my loss of spouse on Facebook did I experience the impact.

Within a week of Ken's passing I began receiving lots of "friend requests" from males I had never heard of or even with any mutual friends.  I shared this with a male friend and his reaction was "Just tell me who they are.  I'm going to beat them up."  Oh, great!  But months later it is still going on and I'm baffled as to how it can be worth the time of these yo-yos to go phishing for us poor lonely widows.  And what gives our status away?  Is there a software that detects us somehow?  A key word?  And I guess I am an easy target since I have a "public" setting on my Facebook account because I want to have my blog out there.

But here's where it got weird.  I got a text message from an "Edwin Nygard" who claimed to live in Las Vegas, NM and would like to talk with me.  Well, I know folk in Las Vegas so I answered it.  He claimed to be widowed for 4 years, had a son in boarding school, missed his dear wife, Ann, and could we talk on the phone.  I avoided that and then he wanted to know how old I was.  I wrote him , " Older than dirt."  I questioned how he found me and he claimed he had seen my picture.  He then sent the picture and sure enough there I was at a table having lunch with friends about 8 years ago.  He claimed he was Facebook friends with one of the women in the picture.  I checked that out and of course, no such thing.  Then there were a series of daily greetings, comments on the weather followed by another request for my age.  I asked "Why?  Are you trying to sell me insurance?"  I quit responding and the messages got even weirder--he could tell from the picture that I was the one he was looking for-- and I unfriended him.  Gone but how creepy!  I felt I was being stalked and at the same time gullible for even responding at all.

But I am amazed at the research that he had done on me and the information that was available.  How in the world did he get that picture?  Yesterday on The View Dr. Phil was on talking about this very problem and told about a client, a widower, who had been milked out of thousands of dollars by a woman who had taken another woman's identity and began an online relationship.

Yesterday another widow resident showed me on her cell phone a whole string of unanswered phone numbers she said were scams.  It is that time of year, folks, so just be wary.