Happy April Fool’s Day. Here is a good story for today. Unfortunately, it is real and a sign of the times like the PeerIndex offer to give you rewards for tweeting about products and their whole offering in general which seems easy to scam. David Lee wrote about how you can buy Facebook “friends” in his story, Fake girlfriend: I paid for make-believe love on Facebook.
David found that for $5 you can hire someone to be your girl friend on Facebook. In fact, there are many people offering this online escort service. For example, one site, Fiverr, has many women - and some men - offering services relating to relationship activity on Facebook for $5. The US-based lists many things people are willing to do for $5.
He selected one and then interviewed her after a bit. David found that “Sophia” has made hundreds of dollars selling her "relationship status." He added that, “twenty-four-year-old Sophia is smart, pretty and has hopes and dreams of getting to grad school.” She also told him that, "the whole Sophia thing is just my marketing username. Nothing on that Facebook profile is real! My photos on there are really me, but nothing else is." Sophia started writing love notes on David’s Facebook page until he confessed that he was a journalist and interviewed her.
This is like all those services that offer you Twitter followers. I get suspicious when some has tens of thousands of followers so no obvious reason. All of these services discredit the value of followers and miss the point. I wrote more about this a while back, see my 2011 post - Our Obsession with Scoring is Now Taking on Individuals on the Web. BTW my Klout score is 56 but I have no idea in what that means nor have I looked at it since I wrote the post in 2011 when it was 55. I tried to find my PeerIndex score but I could not get the site to work. Perhaps it is still mad at me for what I wrote in 2011 when I was a 59.
I've been a victim of this prank too, but it's fun!
Posted by: Holiday Gift Baskets | April 29, 2013 at 07:11 PM