The Perils Of Social Media, Part Gazillion: The Bimbot

As a guy, you eventually realize that, once you're past a certain age, if beautiful women appear to be interested in you, they're up to no good.  So I've never been taken in by one of those gorgeous gals who dress scantily on Facebook and want to be everyone's friend, but once you do sign up turn out to be good for nothing but a lot of spam.  In this piece, Henry Copeland attempts to suss out the motives of these buxom "Bimbots".  His conclusions are profoundly non-surprising:

My guess is that somebody is setting up Facebook accounts with nonexistent (or hired) attractive women, and sending out large numbers of friend requests to guys with the hope that many will accept the request. (For all I know, similar requests, with attractive guys, are being sent to women.) Once you accept their friend request, they gain access to a lot of information about you.
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Even after Facebook tightened up its privacy settings, it seems clear that people are blithely sharing way too much of their lives with people they haven’t fully vetted. And it seems likely that our conversations are being spied on, recorded and analyzed, either by folks from China or by corporate sleuths hiding behind seductive masks to track and influence conversations about their clients, customers and competitors.

PS.  The Bimbot Copeland singles out for special attention, Nicole Bally, is probably in reality Nicole Carroll, a fitness trainer whose had her picture ripped off and posted to Facebook.  Interestingly enough, since his post went up, her Facebook profile has come down.