What's up with friend invites from strangers on facebook

gorfias

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What's up with friend invites from strangers on facebook?

I've gotten a number, usually from reasonably pretty women who appear to have started a facebook account, added 2 pictures and that is it.

Is this a social media hack? Any way for them to post a photo and imbed a malicious macro?

Easy enough to ignore but what are these things?
 

DefunctTheory

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Bots. They'll try to become friends so they can analyze your account, either to provide adds directly through the account, or to figure out what to show you from some other source.

Fairly old tactic. Just now questioning it?
 

gorfias

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AccursedTheory said:
Bots. They'll try to become friends so they can analyze your account, either to provide adds directly through the account, or to figure out what to show you from some other source.

Fairly old tactic. Just now questioning it?
I've just been deleting and ignoring. Just got one. I'm studying for an IT Security exam I hope to take in November and looking further into what they are doing became of interest.

Thanks for your input. Just wet my appetite... sounds like your input can lead to further interesting information.
 

Queen Michael

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I've been thinking about sending friend invites to strangers just to see if they'll accept them, but I haven't actually gotten around to it. Maybe other people did.
 

FalloutJack

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Not that I'm ever on facebook, but I thought this'd been a fairly-common thing since the beginning and that the creators have done basically nothing about it.
 

NLS

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They'll usually post clickbait links to fake sites that are probably riddled with malware.
Another behaviour I've seen is posting a picture with an ad for 90% off Ray Bans with an URL in the picture, and then tag you in the picture. This means anyone who has you on your friends list will indirectly see it in their feed. I doubt anyone falls for it and manually enter the URL, but there's got to be someone out there who's stupid enough.
 

lechat

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NLS said:
They'll usually post clickbait links to fake sites that are probably riddled with malware.
Another behaviour I've seen is posting a picture with an ad for 90% off Ray Bans with an URL in the picture, and then tag you in the picture. This means anyone who has you on your friends list will indirectly see it in their feed. I doubt anyone falls for it and manually enter the URL, but there's got to be someone out there who's stupid enough.
shit 90% off raybans.
you got a link?
 

Queen Michael

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NLS said:
They'll usually post clickbait links to fake sites that are probably riddled with malware.
Another behaviour I've seen is posting a picture with an ad for 90% off Ray Bans with an URL in the picture, and then tag you in the picture. This means anyone who has you on your friends list will indirectly see it in their feed. I doubt anyone falls for it and manually enter the URL, but there's got to be someone out there who's stupid enough.
Why is it always Ray-Bans? I keep getting spam email advertising it. In a way, you've got to admire the positive thinking of the people sending it. "Sure, he hasn't responded at all to the latest fifty emails, but I got a feeling this next one's gonna do it!"
 

Guffe

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Yeah, bots.
If you open their profiles it's usually links to some sort of pornsites.
They are fairly new, I joined FB maybe 7 years ago, and the first one dropped in about 6 months back. Opened it in case it was a friend with a fake name (I have a few of those) and just as you said, strange name, female a few friends and on her wall links to 2 or 3 pornsites. Since then I've had 2 similar from ladies and one male.
Just ignore it / decline it. Nothing has gotten in on my computer from just opening the facebook account, and my computers defence is very basic.

It could also be aliens, who knows?
 

Dirkie

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TheLaughingMagician said:
It's because of the thousands of sexy singles in your area.
In that case it appears I'm such an ugly single person that even spambots put considerable efford in avoiding me.

Hold on, that's a positive thing right?

*I'm off to celebrate the good news for today*
 

Bobular

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I only went on Facebook when I started my business. I'd never been on before and I had just met a whole load of new people as customers and a load of people I knew from school that I couldn't remember were contacting me so when I started getting friend requests from people I didn't recognize I accepted them all.

About a week later I started being tagged in pictures of nude women with links in the pictures (I never clicked the links so I don't know where they went) and as I was tagged in them they went out to all my actual friends. I tried to remove these tags as quick as possible and most of the accounts were closed shortly after anyway but I kept getting tones of request from these kinds of accounts for about a month after. This is why I now check everyone who sends me a friend request to see if they look like a scam account.
 

Headdrivehardscrew

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Queen Michael said:
I've been thinking about sending friend invites to strangers just to see if they'll accept them, but I haven't actually gotten around to it. Maybe other people did.
Aye. Since I am amongst those that would never, ever open a Facebook account with their real name, I see it as nothing more than an interesting business and a bit of a playground.

The majority of my 'friends' are random strangers with which I interact. Some require me to play silly games so they can water their poodles, grow their berries or do other random, tedious stuff I would never understand. Some ask for help making decisions, which I feel obliged to answer by rolling dice or reading tarot cards to them. It seems to amuse them to some extent.

A bunch of strangers have meanwhile become acquaintances. Had sex with a bunch of them, cooked for others, played MTG with others. I see part of Facebook as the responsible adult's version of Tinder. It might be a shit box of chocolates, but it's still good fun. Since I sprinkle it with love, chaos and utter randomness, it's actually not half bad.

As for OP:
Gorfias said:
What's up with friend invites from strangers on facebook?

I've gotten a number, usually from reasonably pretty women who appear to have started a facebook account, added 2 pictures and that is it.

Is this a social media hack? Any way for them to post a photo and imbed a malicious macro?

Easy enough to ignore but what are these things?
1) bots that want to study you as a prospective mark, to send you promises of treasures and rip you off one way or another
2) bots that just want to get your data to put into their collection of data which they will then scan for useful data or just sell on to other shady folk who are in the market of buying random data.
3) random people playing Facebook games, they need your help in hatching that egg, growing that plant, feeding that pony
etc. etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum.
4) lonely people
5) crazy people
6) me.

As for malicious payload... nah, I doubt there's much code to be had there these days. Chat seemed potentially harmful years ago. Phishing and social engineering (attempts) will probably cover most of the potential immediate threats.
 

MCerberus

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Headdrivehardscrew said:
As for malicious payload... nah, I doubt there's much code to be had there these days. Chat seemed potentially harmful years ago. Phishing and social engineering (attempts) will probably cover most of the potential immediate threats.
The social engineering aspect is actually insanely frightening, since once they have enough information for a security question they can crack your entire web life through customer service