I think LJ has been taken over by a Russian-base company, so they are probably legit.

OTOH, Trevor has been getting very dubious emails from Russian women - their name is to them Nadezhda and they wish to be in relationship. I feel that they may not be entirely what they seem but he says they seem like very nice girls.

Hmmmm.

Yes, well, Trevor would...any guy would. They're probably exactly what they seem. TROLLOPS. Keep an eye on Trevor; we don't want him to end up as a mail-order bride.

Surely, surely, he says, they cannot be trollops! They know Dostoevsky and everything! Anya is highly cultured and has 3 dogs and 3 cats who go with her to her summer residence! All they want is fur coats and a new boiler for their mother!

The emails we've been getting have been increasingly bizarre....

I'm keeping an eye.

Seriously, I doubt they can do anything re LJ, but if other people have had problems or are getting uneasy, it's worth trying to check it out. OTOH, if LJ management have been useless, it's hard to know where to go next.

This is why I friend-locked my own LJ. Cyrillic friend-bots added me to a lot of strange LJ friend lists, which rather gave me the creeps (deserved or no). LJ mgmt was of no use, so the friends-lock. There have been rumors of attempted spamming, and I've seen instances of large communities being taken over, so far nothing for small individual LJs. Yes.

Huh. Well, if I don't add them as friends myself, they can't really do anything, can they? Can they, Gandalf?

I've been getting friended by the same Russians. I've taken to locking all posts -- including memes. The Russian blogs seem to delete themselves after a month or two.

The Russian blogs are spam-bots, and should not be friended. You can report them to the LJ Abuse team.

The basic FAQ is here and the contact form is here. Use the option for "suspected bot account".

Well, I would NEVER friend them, since I can't understand them...but why do they friend me in the first place? They must know most people wouldn't friend them...and they can't get access to my friends list. Or can they? I hate to friends-lock the blog, since nice people do come along...

I haven't looked to see if your LJ posts are searchable by Google or not (if you marked the "minimize my posts in search engine" option they should not be), however, anyone can look at who is listed on your info page as friends, and for that matter, by adding "/friends" to the end of anyones LJ URL (http://pkmorrison.livejournal.com/friends, for example) you can read the *public* posts of anyone's friends. Locked posts are never seen by anyone that poster hasn't added to their friends' list.

Since these things are simply robots looking for an "in" they really don't care if they get actual results or not, but LJ does take action on the ones that are reported to them.

Sorry (or am I?) and sad to say, the only Russian I know (not personally of course ) is Vladimir Nabakov.

It does sound a tad bit odd.

My mistake and someone eles pointed it out so kindly it should be N-A-B-O-K-O-V rather than my sad attempt to spell his name phonetically.

My English teacher from high school would berate me but good on some of my sad attempts to spell. In any case, thanks to whomever pointed out my mistake.