I too have seen the danger in connecting with friends of friends and with other people who find you through the 'friend finder' feature or perhaps bump into you a conference or class. Most of the time they're reasonably interesting and sometimes it can help nurture a true friendship, but once in a blue moon someone gets through and becomes your friend with the sole purpose of marketing to you. Ugh.

I've recently had this happen with my Facebook account and though I generally prefer people who aren't my friends connect with me through the Ask Dave Taylor fan club (you're a member, right?) sometimes I connect with them from my personal account.

Which is the only explanation I had when I noticed that the third event invitation I'd received from this one chap was for how to make money with online gambling. Now I realize that this was someone who I connected with on the strength of mutual friends, but didn't actually know, but still, wayyyy off target:

The two choices here are "Confirm" or "Ignore", but there's no "Help! Get Me Off This Guy's Mailing List!" button, so here's what I did: I Cmd-clicked on his name, which opened up a new tab in my browser and loaded up his profile.

Then I clicked on "Ignore" to mark this particular event:

Meanwhile, though, in the other tab, I had his entire Facebook profile loaded up:

Since there is no easy way to create a filter that rejects event invitations from certain friends automatically, I decided that since I wasn't sure who this chap was anyway, I'd just unfriend him on Facebook instead.

Once you're viewing the other person's profile, you need to scroll down and look for the following in the lower left side:

As the highlight shows, you want to select "Remove from Friends" to zap them. Confirm?

Confirmed! You're no longer connected to them via the Facebook system. Problem solved.