On Improbable Facebook Friend Requests

[danieldwilliam]

Probably in celebration of International Women's Day but I've started receiving Facebook friend requests from improbably nubile young women - again.

I had a rash of these, I guess, about a year ago.

They appear in my friend request notifications, I ignore them, then they disappear - presumably once the accounts have been deleted for being not actually real people.

I'm not sure what purpose these friend requests serve. The people behind it are clearly looking for something but I can't work out what.

Comments

[mountainkiss]

My guess would be either to connect with someone looking for sex (and hence extract money, one way or another) or find connection that could somehow lead to rescue. But I don’t know a lot about it.

[danieldwilliam]

The someone looking for sex >>> money angle is the most obvious.

I hadn't considered the rescue angle.

I had more or less convinced myself that there were no real people behind the accounts and that there was some sort of data shenanigans going on.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, they add you, then your friends, and extract data about all of you to use for identity fraud.

[danieldwilliam]

So my ignoring them is actually do the rest of my friends a favour?

[andrewducker]

Yeah - used to be that your Date of Birth could be visible to "friends of friends", I think. Might not be true now.