The Dangers Of Bebo - Part II

The Dangers Of Bebo and MySpace! PART I

24 hours have passed since I underwent the transformation into a woman. To those who are unfamiliar with my aim, I decided to sign up to Bebo.com posing as a girl in order to coax total strangers into sharing their contact details with me. I am now in the rather smug position of being able to tell you I managed to acquire mobile numbers and HOME ADDRESSES of the majority of those who accepted my invitation for friendship. So how did I manage to find friends?So that’s where we pick up the story. After creating a false email address, finding a suitable pic of a babe and signing up to Bebo.com I set about searching for friends because after all I’m a lonely New Yorker who moved to Meath because my Dad got a job there so I’m desperate for friends. I was semi-pleased to discover that adding friends on Bebo isn’t all that easy because you actually have to know their email address to be able to add them. I should have been thrilled after finding this out but because I was desperate to find some friends, it made the job in hand slightly more difficult because now it meant I had to find a work around.

So I paused for a few moments before noticing the “School” and “College” tab which I clicked because it would only seem logical to be able to add yourself to a school and be able to see everyone else who signed up to the college. Upon clicking on “College” I was asked to select a Country and then a state (having selected the USA) and then finally I could browse through all the colleges registered on the site. My first attempt at enrolling myself as a student was foiled because I was asked to enter my student email which must be verified. I couldn’t have been bothered to verify another email address so I went back over the procedure only this time I said I was Alumni and didn’t have to verify an email address (presumably because few graduates would remember their college email).

I was in! I was now brought to a page listing everyone from the college, past and present. Now I was free to look at people’s public profiles and request to add them as a friend. For the next 10 minutes I added about 6 friends in between many sips of coffee, all male and between the ages of 17 and 21. Once I did that it was simply a matter of playing the waiting game.

A few hours later I received an email saying that “XXXX” had connected with me on Bebo. I then had to log out of my genuine account (that is my account) and log in as Tracy so I could view this persons profile. Now at this point I’d like to point out that I won’t at any stage reveal the names of those who were duped. Nevertheless “XXXX’s” profile tested positive for the following banned substances… Mobile phone number and home address. I could do nothing but smile as I realised that unbeknownst to XXXX, I was in a very powerful position. Granted they were based in New York and here I am in Ireland but there are tonnes of US-based sites that are crying out for numbers to send junk txt’s to and likewise I could have done the same with their home address!

As I was reading that profile, I received another email saying that another person had added me. This time around the person was only choosing to display their phone number. Smart choice - Dumbass! Over the next few hours everyone that I had sent a friend request out to had accepted it and it turned out that that first person was the only one who entered in their home address while everyone else was showing their phone number.

I could have gone further and at this stage it would actually be easier to find friends because I would only have to click on “Friends Friends” and be given the option to add all my mutual friends with only one click. It would have beat having to add each person individually but I feel that I have already proven my point and that is the simple fact that Bebo has the potential to wreak havok on people’s lives while that person is left wondering just why €5 is going missing from their phone credit each day and why they are all of a sudden receiving 17 catalogues daily. Of course the danger doesn’t end there and armed with a home address there is the potential for some serious physical harm being done to the victim.

Before I started this experiment, I was under the impression that Bebo was a free for all where anybody could simply search for someone and add them, instead the other way for someone to get in contact with strangers is to join a college or a school. Once you do add someone, that person is advised to only accept you if they actually know you. However because people added me, the beautiful stranger, it’s proof that people aren’t following the advise but even though the onus is on the people to make sure they are responsible in choosing who to add, I feel that Bebo should tighten up it’s security further to make it harder for people to do exactly as I did.

To conclude this report I’d like to emphasise that I did this because I believe services like Bebo.com, Myspace.com and other community sites aimed at progressively younger users are dangerous and hopefully by doing this I can help spread awareness of this very real danger.

Thanks for taking the time out to read this and please feel free to link to this article and/or leave a comment telling me what you think!

bebo, myspace, danger, identity theft, paedophile, pervert, social experiment

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Published:
11.02.06 / 12am
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Bebo
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