The Bebo abuse department have once again failed to respond usefully to clear abuse of their service, and violation of their Terms of Use.
Gareth
You recently reported abuse for member Leyla H on October 29, 2006. The best thing for you to do is block this person from your profile. If you ignore this person chances are they will get bored and leave you alone. I have provided instructions below on how you can do this.
To block/unblock a member follow these steps:
1) Visit http://www.Bebo.com and sign-in using your email address or username and password.
2) Navigate to the profile of the person you wish to block. You can do this by clicking on their username or photos in your profile. Alternatively, access their profile by going to http://username.bebo.com.
3) Under their profile photo, find the ‘Block’ link and click on it.
4) Click the button ‘Block This Member’.
Please note that this matter has now been CLOSED. If you feel this Bebo member continues to violate our Terms of Use after you have your block in place, you can submit another ‘Report Abuse’ form.
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Please do not reply directly to this email.
As my previous post regarding Bebo spam has thus far generated 56 comments from multiple nationalities, and increased this websites hits by 420% over the average for the past 7 months, this is clearly neither a minor nor a local problem. Bebo’s inaction leaves users at the mercy of spammers and the wilfully abusive. I experienced a situation several months ago where I repeatedly received abusive messages from a small number of teenagers at an unfamiliar school in Ireland. Multiple reports sent to Bebo abuse did nothing to reduce the problem, and I was forced to individually block tens of friends of friends of the comment posters to ensure no further attacks. I don’t want to get into making hasty generalisations from a small sample, but my guess is that repeated inaction in the light of such attacks (and I’ve known at least one girl who received multiple salacious and sexually explicit Bebo comments, yet was unable to get action taken by Bebo’s abuse department – assuming it exists), leave Bebo open to legal action. Perhaps a reader involved in the legal profession might offer an informal opinion?
While these two kinds of unwanted comments and messages (abuse and spam) are not directly related, they do pose a worrying trend. One might hope that Bebo’s staff are concentrating their resources on arguably more serious (and certainly more headline grabbing) problems; removing obviously explicit and criminal material, and dealing with users who attempt to use the service to obtain sexual contact with teenagers and children below the age of consent. On the other hand, given their failure to address the problems listed above, can they be trusted to deal with even such sensitive, and potentially embarrassing areas?
Gareth Stack 
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