No there are tons of games that give you bonuses based on how many friends you have in the game. Thus a certain amount of friend spamming to try and draw in help on games.
I have had a few friend requests from people i absolutely did not know.
I think some of that came from when i used to use their Speeddate application. I would get a friend request and a message saying “Go add me on this site so we can talk and see each others pictures.” Needless to say, the site requires a credit card number.
Its become kind of fun, i love calling them out, or beating them at their own game. They get pretty flustered:p
I was on Facebook for a while and had over 500 “friends”, almost all of whom I acquired through the various games I was playing. I was always getting friend requests with comments that consisted solely of the name of a game I was playing.
That isn’t good. There has been a spate of people creating fake Facebook accounts based upon information gleaned off the web. This happening to a friend of mine - he got the clue in a similar way - he got Facebook friend requests coming to the wrong email. Some requests were genuine people looking for him - and they had found the fake account. The account even had legit picture of him.
So why is this being done? The Facebook page was being used to provide malware. It was not nice. My friend is very computer litterate and tracked the miscreant down to somewhere in Malaysia. He then contacted Facebook’s admin and had the fake account taken down.
If I were you I would check for the existence of this account, and if it is what I suspect, you will need to contact Facebook and get them to delete it. With luck this should not be too hard, my friend had a very positive experience with Facebook over this.
This is true, assuming none of the people trying to add you have a reason to know your email address. Facebook will let you invite a friend if you know their email. But I believe they make a big point of saying that so-and-so is inviting you to join, not adding you.
What worries me about the quote above is that you can shut off all email notifications on Facebook. If the scammers ever figure that out, you won’t know your email is being used until you try and make an account. It surprises me that none of the people who tried to friend the guy figured it out.
In retrospect such requests could be all manner of the usual crud. Phishing attempts (directs you to a fake Facebook login page that snatfs you password), driveby malware downloads, it is all a bit painful. If you are not using Firefox plus NoScript life could be a bit unpleasant.
One thing that comes to mind is identity theft - if you have personal information in your profile that you have restricted to “friends only”, then accepting the stranger’s friend request will let him see that information.
Lots of companies and businesses do not only internet searches of potential employees, but Facebook searches and the like. Such information is trivial to obtain when viewing the information of someone who lets everyone view their profile… But for people who limit their profile views to friends only (smart people), I think it may be a conspiracy for companies to create fake accounts and go out and get as many friends as possible in case they are a future (or current) employee. Now, even if its not the company doing this, one could potentially make a racket by offering companies the ability to see what information they’ve scoured up on various people’s social networking profiles.
