Friend Requests from Strangers

Hey everyone.  I will preface my question by first noting that on Face Book, I am extremely careful about accepting friend requests.  But for whatever reason, it never occurred to me to be equally selective here.  To this point, I have accepted all friend requests, regardless of who they are from, or if we have had any prior interactions.  And this brings me to my question.  Am I being foolish?  Is there some danger in accepting friend requests here?  If someone is hell bent on giving you a hard time, then can he or she do this more easily as a (nominal) friend as compared to otherwise?  Just curious, because the sheer number of requests I get from strangers is staggering.  Thank you in advance.

Commenting to follow, because I also have the same concerns. I also get a relentless number of friend requests from people with no previous interactions.
Caveat: I did have a situation where my Facebook was connected to my chess.com profile and someone found out more info than I would have liked.

I get a lot of friend requests, mostly from men from other countries. Then they message me and tell me I’m pretty or want to chat with me during games. This is a chess website. I don’t get it, and I have stopped accepting most friend requests, until after I’ve played a game or two with someone and they can make it that amount of time without harassing me.

One guy recently asked if he could talk to me on some other platform since I’m not “on here a lot”. I removed and blocked him from my account. Sometimes I turn off the chat in games, too, so people can’t even talk to me.😅

Scammers are everywhere. I’m sure someone has figured out a way to take advantage of people who want to play chess.

I don’t think you’re being foolish. Like me, you probably didn’t expect a bunch of weirdos to get in touch with you on a chess website. When you add someone as a friend, or play a game with them, they have the ability to contact you. Avoiding people who don’t share a serious interest in playing is definitely a solution.😁

One interesting thing about friends list that I did not know before - when someone that is your friend starts a post, you are notified. At least, that just happened to myself as I received a notification that Vance917 had posted. So, that could be a problem.

Ironically, Vance917, you were my first friend on this site and I likely requested you as I had started playing and was learning the features. Since then, I get 3-5 random friend requests a day -- I'm not sure if this has gone up since I'm playing more, or is it always like this? It seems to have gotten much worse over the last few weeks.

Like lemaymelissa, I get messaged quite a bit of "Hi", "Hello" "What do you do?" and yesterday (as I got thrashed in a timed game)... "Come on girl, you can do better" and "Do you want to see more?" and a barrage of winky faces nonstop. The only reason I haven't turned the chat off is I assume playing in person has far more distractions and I'm building up to that. But, getting defeated by someone who manages all these chats while outplaying me hurts... thus, unfriended!

Very relatable.

I get a lot of friends requests. I decline most of them because I don't know them. The only ones I accept are the ones that I know and are familiar with.

I get nearly 40 friend requests on a daily basis. I selectively accept.

I get so many friend requests every single day and I accept them all just because like OP said, I don't think much about it here. I do however, get tons of creepy messages nearly every day and I ignore 95% of them. I sometimes respond to messages if it's friendly and I don't get creep vibes.

Something similar to what lemaymelissa described happened to me recently [and I'm an old man]. Followed by a request for some kind of private chat. declined of course.

Thank goodness I not a part of the social media epidemic,never will be, no Facebook, twitter, Instagram, ticktock stuff, it's a bit of a toxic environment and not an area my family chooses to have trust, my neighbours across the way went on a 2 week holiday to Turkey,when they got back they found they had been burgled, they took everything, 3 piece settee & chairs, 3 T.V.s and anything else worth anything!! Apparently they had told there mates and friends on Facebook when they were going away, the date, when they were back?? The police came over asking all the neighbours questions but the modern spread of media can have its bedside?!!