Ask HN: Random Facebook Friend Requests

6 points·codecurve··6 comments

Have you just had a series of random Facebook friend requests? Myself and a number of my friends have just received friend requests from non-legit accounts. Potential exploit? Have you guys experienced this?

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I have received bogus friend requests from bogus fb accounts about 10 times since i've been on facebook. (8 years). Some even go as far as friending people I am friends with and liking things that I'm liking or being from my home town. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a fake account and just a really bizarre person. Usually you can spot a fake from lack of interaction with other people on their timeline. That is not to say that elaborate fakes haven't been creating bogus friend networks. It would be an interesting project to collect the fb_ids from all these potentially bogus accounts, though it would be best to get the info that is surely private, like login times/locations. I'm sure the people in quality assurance at facebook are all over this.

This used to happen a lot to a friend of mine. We eventually worked out, through some rather underhand methods, that it was a stalker from her home town. Fortunately she lived thousands of miles away from there so there was no physical danger, but it was still most irritating for her.

Having said that, that's probably not what's going on here - but I think one should never underestimate the capacity of creeps with too much time on their hands.

I've started getting a lot, at least once a week from accounts barely a week old.

Had two today, have had a couple in the past but not for at least a year.

Nope. But I don't have facebook, so that may be why.

What's "facebook"?

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