I do not have a Facebook account and have never accessed anybody else’s pages.
I am getting e-mail invitations to “friend” some person I don’t know, and the e-mail mentions several other people whom it says I might know, one of whom is (or has the same name as) my sister.
I figure this is likely some sort of scam which is designed to extract info from me, get me to download a virus, cause a worldwide financial meltdown or some such. I have no intention of following up on it. My question is - does the apparent mention of my sister mean that her account has been hacked/compromised, and should I warn her?
If Jackmannii was getting something from his sister asking him to friend her, I would agree, but he’s getting something from someone he doesn’t know, who wouldn’t have any reason to have him in their address book, I would presume.
My concern is that the sister has picked up some malware or accessed some Facebook app that is evil, and that is what sent out the email based on the sister’s address book.
Even stranger: I get e-mails saying people I know want me to join and “friend” them, complete with actual photographs of them, supposedly their Facebook photos. But many of these people don’t even have a Facebook account!
Facebook does a (really unsavory, in my opinion) thing where they ask you for your email address and password, then send invites out to everyone in your address book.
My guess is that this person you don’t know is a friend of your sisters, and she once sent an email out to a bunch of people including him and you. His email client saved your address, and then, later, he signed up for facebook, friended your sister, and gave facebook access to his address book. Facebook found your address in his address book, and sent out some spam. They either figured out that you were likely to know your sister because they analyzed some personal networks, or you have the same name (or she listed her maiden name somewhere), or just blind chance.
It could be a scam, but I think it’s just facebook being a bad netizen.
Yes, Facebook can do this. I knew about this, so when I signed up I immediately went about securing my page so that my name didn’t get thrown about like that. My page was sealed within an hour, but it wasn’t quite fast enough for a few. It wasn’t a problem.
Perhaps this person was on some group e-mail that you were also on. It got your name because he allowed Facebook to access his e-mail account. Then it suggests you as a friend because one time you were on the same mass e-mail that he was on. Maybe you even have more friends in common than you know.
I don’t know for sure why somebody you don’t know would invite you to be a friend, but there are several third party applications (games mostly) where the more friends you have, the higher a level you can achieve. One of my friends has nearly a thousand friends just to play Mafia Wars. I had to completely hide his profile because his Mafia Wars updates were swamping my News Feed.
Related question: I do have a FB account, and in the last month I’ve received two friend requests from women who are complete strangers to me. We had no friends in common. They both were young (in their 20s), attractive, and single (while I am none of those).
I declined both friendings, figuring it was some kind of scam targeting horny middle aged men (I am some of those). But what’s the scam?
They are desperate to meet horny middle-aged men and more so that they can have a huge Friends List. Some people are way in to that.
They are trying to get you to link to their pay-per-view porn site.
IMHO FWIW:
I run a local social club with a couple of hundred members, and I’m blonde so I don’t always remember everyone I meet. The last thing I want to do is not friend someone and offend them but I don’t want to give some porn-scammer access to view my friends list either.
When someone sends you a friend request - you can click on their name and view their info, photos or recent wall posts. Usually that will tell you all you need to know about whether or not it’s a scam.
Yeah, I did that – I could only see their picture, brief profile, and their friends, and none of the information gave any clue as to how I might know them.
The first time it happened, I sent a message to her apologizing for not recognizing her and asking how I knew her. She never responded. The second one, I just declined and clicked the box that said “I do not know this person.”
I guess what I meant is that if it is a porn scam, usually her wall post will have something that says “hey - i posted a bunch of new pics here : www.virusembeddedlinkofhellishperveteddeathyouhornymiddleagedskeeze.badbadbad”
And usually their recent activity/history will show that they just joined FB.
You can set your profile to be shown only to friends. It sounds like that was the case with Skammer, where he could only see a brief listing and a thumbnail picture and would need to be friends with the person to see the items you mention.
One possibility (how likely a possibility probably depends on how common your name is) is that the person is trying to connect with someone who happens to have the same name as you and just sent friend requests to everyone with your name assuming the right Skammer will accept.
A lot of people give away their passwords without thought.
In the case of this sort of thing, lots of people do it without even realizing it, because they use the same password for everything, and their user name is their email address. So, they go sign up for a web service, and it asks them for their email address (to use as a username) and to pick a password. They use their standard password, and click to the next page, which looks really similar.
Huh, funny, it’s asking me the same thing, they think. They enter their user name (email address) and password, and continue on, never bothering to read the text that explains that this will “help their friends find out about our cool features” or some other such blather. Sometimes these second pages are quite misleading. I’ve been “tricked” before, and only the fact that I don’t reuse passwords kept me from spamming my entire address book.
