A stranger on Facebook has asked me to help him speak Englis

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So I replied to a video on a Facebook page I'm following, and this random man with a foreign name replied to my post asking me if I spoke native English, which I said yes (my post or the video had nothing to do with language). Then he replied asking if I can teach him to speak better English (obviously he was speaking English when asking me but he might just know the basics). So I told him that I don't know him very well, and then he started making me feel guilty by saying that everyone else he asked on the internet turned him down. Now he's sent me a friend request.

I like to help people, but I'm not sure if this guy is genuine or not. How do I know he's not some sort of hacker or something, posing as a person that needs help learning English?
What would you do? Would it be gullible of me to accept his friend request and help him?

I'm really into languages so I like those kinds of exchanges, as long as they teach me their native language too. There is an app called HelloTalk dedicated to this. But IMHO if you are uncomfortable don't do it, and if you already turned him down he should respect your wishes otherwise he's out of line to continue bothering you, I've also gotten sketchy friend requests that turned out to be scammers so I understand your hesitation.

EDIT: On second read the circumstances of him messaging you out of the blue are kind of weird. Did the video or page have anything to do with learning English?

Experience tells me if it's Japanese, Korean or Thai...
It'll likely be actually someone who's trying to learn English.

I had my own encounters with complete strangers, and also had online mutual friends asked me to volunteer to chat English with their other non-native English users.

At least in general terms.
I had more experience with other platforms than Facebook, and that's at least over a year ago.



The rest..? I'm not sure.
I'd likely be a bit wary or just at this present, decline.

It's still ultimately up to you.

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A friend told me to block him, as it doesn't sound genuine to her. So that's what I did.

He wasn't a mutual friend, if he was I might have given him a chance, but I do not want to take any chances otherwise.

I don't see what there is to be afraid of. Were you worried that you'd accidentally give him some sensitive personal information? There isn't much he could do to harm you if you two just chat online. Hackers cannot hack people's computers or accounts via online conversations.

Well my profile picture consists of me and my boyfriend so I don't think he assumed I was lonely.

It was just the way he seemed so desperate for me to learn him English and that he tried guilting me into it. Plus I'm not very good at teaching things to other people, especially if I don't know them.

But now that you said it would be harmless to accept his friend request and message him, I now feel guilty for blocking him. On the other hand, if I wanted to improve my skills at a foreign language, I wouldn't go asking strangers on the internet to help me. There's plenty of sites and books to help you learn a language.

Don't feel guilty Joe as that was his intention.

As you said there are plenty of places to learn English.

He was attempting to take advantage of your compassion from your comment.

No means no.

You were right to be wary, thats very odd behavior for facebook as well as in general. Gotta be some kind of scam.

The unthinkable has happened - my Facebook account got hacked into today. I hope it wasn't that same guy who hacked in, even though I blocked him he might have created another account and found me then hacked into my account as a payback for rejecting him. Surely not??

Whoever the dickhead was who hacked in, they posted a couple of weird posts about winning £700, and tagged almost everyone in my friends list. I hope that this is benign. But I don't see what kick they got out of it.

I looked through all my Facebook settings and it seems like they haven't done any damage. I went through the procedures of securing my account, logged out of every recent log-in, and changed my password.

It turns out I was blocked by one of my Facebook friends, not sure why.

But I don't see how someone could have guessed my very secure password, as it has nothing to do with anything in any of my public information. And nobody else has been on my mobile device or my laptop, and I have not logged in on any public computers for months, if not years. And I have all of my privacy settings activated, and my friends list is hidden from the public.

It's just really spooky how I posted this thread about being paranoid of hackers, and suddenly I WAS hacked into. I do feel uncomfortable and upset. I don't need this stress in my life. How did they even get in?

This is why I don't want to do all of my shopping online and I panic when people say that this pandemic will end all of retail (despite the shops being open). If hackers can get into one's computer data that easily via trojan installation or whatever then who knows how much all of your different accounts for different shops are at risk? I rather just go into shops and do the shopping rather than doing everything behind a screen at the risk of exposing my money to the web. No thank you.

After 9 years of being on Facebook this is the first ever time it has been hacked, so I don't know much about why or how people hack into other people's Facebook accounts, but I do know that there are more hackers out there than there ever was.