Have you ever encountered someone who immediately wants to be your best friend? Flattering, right? Maybe not. College brings us a lot of new experiences; the ability to make new friends, meet new and exciting people, and be introduced to new ways of creepy manipulation.

The phenomenon known as “social poaching” is particularly present at college.

As a freshman, it is often overwhelming to be thrown into a completely different environment where you know no one. Freshmen try to meet as many new people as possible in order to establish a friend network, something which is clearly essential to living at college. Most of the people encountered in the first weeks of college are fine and will eventually drop out of your life completely as you refine your social network, however, every once in awhile you’ll encounter a bad egg, the social poacher.

The bad egg will befriend you immediately, and upon being introduced to your friends, immediately befriend them. This sound normal, right? Wrong. Social poachers are very charismatic people, and will move from group to group via different people within one social group of friends, the ultimate goal being to know as many people as humanly possible.

So why is this a bad thing? Because social poachers exploit people to gain whatever their goal is in knowing so many people; attention, party invites, sex, drugs, etc. Be aware of that if your new friend seems a little “BFFF” (best friends ****ing forever) with you, becomes BFFF with your other friends upon meeting them, and might be a little too charismatic, there’s a good chance that you’ve been poached.