Chuck Miller is NOT offering free iPads on Facebook… sorry, you gotta go buy one legitimately.

I am extremely scrupulous when it comes to my security on the Internet.  I’ve been a vicitim of identity theft on more than one occasion, and that makes me hyper-vigilant if anything seems out of place with my social media accounts or my credit card accounts.

If I even suspect – for a second – that anything I do online has been compromised, I will change my password right away.  I’ve even provided security questions to my credit card companies that – even if somebody figures out the answer from context – the “answer” isn’t the true answer.  Example – if the security question was something like, “What is the name of Chuck’s fiction novel about a baseball team,” I would have an answer of “Rocky Mountain Film Lab.”

And with that in mind…

I do have an account on Facebook.  My friends list includes a mixture of Times-Union bloggers and readers, Premier Basketball League players and staffers, a couple of family members, and musicians that I’ve interviewed in the past.

So when I got an invitation for a free iPad event from two of my friends – one a musician, the other a PBL front office guy – I knew right off the bat that something didn’t match up.  First off, nobody gives away free iPads or iPhones or iThis or iThat.  And they certainly wouldn’t give them away on Facebook.

It as simple.  Their Facebook accounts had been compromised, and if I clicked on the “free iPad link,” my account would also be compromised as well.  Ain’t happening.

This followed a weird message I got from one of my family members, who was trapped in Europe and needed money wired to her so she could come home.  That was a strange e-mail.  Especially when the “family member” was my daughter Cassaundra, who last time I checked was still in Seattle – which I believe is still part of the United States.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I’m getting requests from people who want to be my friend – people I don’t recognize.  This is not unusual; I have some friends who read my articles and blog posts, they don’t always use their real names.  It took me two weeks to figure out that “Nick Livingston” knew me because he posted as “Precious Roy” on the minor league sports message board Our Sports Central, and that he also was a beat writer for the PBL’s Lawton-Fort Sill Cavalry basketball team.

These requests come into my e-mail account, which is linked to Facebook to alert me if anyone responds to any of my FB posts or likes any of my FB links.  Now I could directly click from the e-mail into FB and see who this friend is…

Nope.  Ain’t doing that.  I don’t want that happening to my friends, and I don’t want that happening to me.

If I get a friend request, I will first log directly into Facebook itself  – not through my e-mail, but by typing facebook.com into my browser – and checking the list to see who might have sent me a friend request.  If a friend request doesn’t show up directly through the Facebook link, then whoever sent the request to my e-mail is trying to phish for passwords, and he ain’t getting mine.

I’ll also get requests to “friend” via Friend Finder, where someone from Italy or Ukraine or Schoharie or some other foreign land wants to “friend” me.  These “friends” often have runway model pictures and look totally smoky hot.  I’m sure the photos were totally hot, if I could figure out which copy of Maxim the scammer scanned the pictures out of to pretend they were that person.  Nice try.

So if you’re a friend of mine on Facebook, and you get a message from me claiming that I have free iPads to give away, or that I’ve been trapped in Europe and need money to come home… get in touch with me quickly and let me know.

And then I’ll try to figure out how to incorporate more difficult keyboard symbols into my password.  Maybe some Greek letters… maybe some Chinese characters… if I have to break out a copy of the Thorndike-Barnhart dictionary and punch in some pronunciation characters, I’ll do it if it means increasing my security firewall.

Now where on this keyboard can I find the schwa? Oh… thəre it is…