Received friend requests from untrustworthy people

[dropl9x]

So they wanted to be my friend. About 12 to 15 people.

A person told me he will give me a job, another one told me he wants me to marry his daughter, another one said to invest in his TSX firm, another one told me she is a famous germ researcher another one is a world-renowned surgen, another person had 100,000 steps a day etc.

And they are always available all throughout the day.

Is Fitbit aware of this situation? How trustworthy is Fitbit?

Is there no genuine health-conscious and strictly disciplined and strongly will-powered person out there who has been running and walking for the last 10 years and eating healthy home-cooked food within that time?

Thank you.

By the way, I canceled all their friendships.

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[Odyssey13]

Wow @dropl9x ! You sure had a bunch of more than odd friends. What I do is check the person's profile out and make a decision to accept a request that way. If they are in a challenge that I'm part of for a good period of time, I'll accept them. I've been on the forums for almost nine years and haven't had such things happen to me. Wise of you to remove them as friends. There are genuine people on these forums who have been health conscious for years and own a Fitbit. The more social area of the forums, where you can read their posts and judge them a bit more, can be found by clicking the link in my signature. Most of my time on the forums is from here, not on the community feed from the app, so perhaps that shelters me from such "friends"

[dropl9x]

I am careful about these things. Always they ask very personal questions if I have partners or not. I find it very offensive. I tried to follow their website even. Google Chrome deemed them as a dangerous site or empty site. They are bit.ly or some tweeter. Why is that, if the tweeter is a safe site? I don't have any social network account but still, Fitbit should do something. Should know about these things.  Should make Fitbit safer. There are young people too on Fitbit. It seems like the world is not safe even here.

[dropl9x]

I also dislike when people are dishonest and lie and say they did something but they didn't or weren't.

[Odyssey13 · Accepted solution]

I agree that it's disappointing, @dropl9x , but you never know someone's motives. For me, I take people at face value, but don't really get into personal information with anyone. A friend used to say my one talent is the ability to discuss the weather so you'd never know anything about me. I'm fairly cautious online. As for safe places online, they are only as safe if we stay diligent, just as any street in our town is safe if we take precautions.

This is from an article on security at PCMag,  "Twitter allows users to connect with anyone in the world, but it has also become a dangerous place filled with harassment and abuse. People have been targeted by coordinated harassment campaigns that can involve anything from threats and spamming to account hacks and worse."

As for bit.ly - Malwarebytes, a company that helps protects from such things, had this article and it said to be careful of those links. It's an older article, but it's from a known site.

Fitbit does their best, but in the end it's up to each of us to be careful when accepting requests or clicking on links. On these forums, there are many who post links to random sites and ask people to be their friend. No matter what countermeasures are taken, there will always be someone who gets in and another one who will accept their requests. Being honest is probably at the bottom of their list, sad to say.

[charleskn]

Fitbit needs much better filters and controls for this. I should be able to block accounts that aren't at least of a certain age, have posts or exercise activity, etc.

I get daily friend requests, and some are from accounts that are years old, but there are no badges, groups, etc. I understand some might set their privacy settings to block this, but I should be able to not see requests from users that don't have these things (even if I can't see them until we're friends).

[Angie_Fit_]

I'm constantly getting DM's from men who ask to chat to me on other platforms and are treating the Fitbit app as a Dating app.

The only solution seems to be to ignore or block but i strongly feel users should be given the choice to lock their DM's rather than have to continuously react to the problem. Fitbit are facilitating predatory behavior by not giving this as an option and failing to create a safe space for users as a result. What are fitbit going to do about this? 

[charleskn]

True words @Odyssey13. 

And I think Fitbit could do a much better job providing filters to help filter out who can reach out to you. The scammers tend to have a couple different profiles tells:

• They tend belong to every open group available, or none
• Profile was just created, or they have been around a long time and have no posts, badges, steps, etc
• Some say follow my sports blog with a bit.ly link

This is especially disappointing as Fitbit won't allow you to invite some people to challenges based on mis-matched daily step counts, so they do this in some places and not others.

[Odyssey13]

Hi @Angie_Fit_  your post was moved to this thread where we were discussing the same thing. Read through the posts. There is no way to lock down your DMs.