fewer than 2% are connected to one another), flag the account as spam and cancel all those contact requests, block the IP. if within those N people, the interlinkage ratio is low (e.g. detect new accounts that send contact requests to > N (say, 100) people Off the top of my head, using social network metrics: There seem to be a simple ways to fix this. I don't receive spam friend requests on Facebook, MSN, or Google Talk. What I don't understand is why this is such a problem for Skype (and Twitter), but not for other services. I don't think it's a difficult issue, and I also don't want to miss out on legitimate contact requests. Many posters in this forum claim that it's a difficult problem and that users should just disable contact request notifications.

The Skype forum indicates they are working on it, with 14+ pages of user complaints here and here.

So, several times a day I have to acknowledge, decline, and block requests like this: While I have my privacy set to allow contacts only from people in my contact list, there is no way to block contact requests, in in reality I wouldn't want to block contact requests anyway since sometime legitimate people do contact me. It's a way for 'sexy girls' to get around your privacy settings and still contact you. Skype has been plagued over the years with the problem of spam 'contact requests'.

Skype contact request not received