Normally I don’t pay much attention these as I figure there’s some scam involved. You occasionally have these friend requests on Facebook from young women you do not know showing lots of sexy poses and cleavage in the photos and some sketchy, minimalist personal info. I’m trying to figure out the scam here. What are they going to get out of you friending them?
Do they have a web site they want you to join? If so it would be fees for joining or advertising revenues…
Just attention-whores would be my first guess, unless something else is obvious.
No, they’re not real accounts. Usually they have friend counts in the single or double digits.
Generally, they exist to (1)figure out who is gullible and (2)get all the personal information they and their friends have put into Facebook for later use by that company.
I did actually wind up adding a woman who turned out to be a real lady from the Ukraine. It was rather interesting reading her more local accounts of the Crimea thing.
Of course, I have absolutely no personal information on my account besides my name, and I had checked to make sure she had real friends and real interests.
I know, it’s like, why do all these wealthy Nigerian princes keep coming to me for help? I can’t pay any more ransoms anyway, until I get my reward for the last four.
They’ll also put advertising on your news feed. In one case, I had one message me to try to sell me something directly.
I also manage a couple of groups and get phony requests all the time. They’re easy to spot.
It could be twue wuv.
That’s the answer. If you’re friends then you see their posts on your feed. And their posts are “Click this site for chance to win $500 from SketchyCo!”, “Which SketchyCo brand booze fits your lifestyle - Take this quiz!” and “Weekend Sale at SketchyCo!”
Right, they’re obviously not real accounts, lacking posts (other than pictures) or friends in the same location, or interests, or anything that people on facebook normally share.
Just a lot (sometimes hundreds) of friends, mostly male, and the only activity is from men posting “wow babe you rock”. Rocket scientists, clearly.
I wonder about this too, and the only guess I can come up with is that they have some use for the personal information that you can get from a FB friend. Not that I can figure that out.
Similarly, there are posts like “Think of a city without the letter ‘A’ – I betcha can’t!” Which is stupid because it’s easy, and an astounding number of people reply to these. I’ve heard that these are posted from accounts that are merely gaining popularity, which they can then change to some other purpose, but again, I’m not sure what that purpose could be.
The ones I’ve seen haven’t had any such posts on their pages. Maybe just not yet.
I haven’t gotten one of these requests on Facebook in a long time; a few years I’d say.
These days I keep getting them on Skype.
I haven’t gotten the friend request from these people in awhile either. I’m noticing something new: I read comments occasionally on big “like” pages (not personal pages, but NPR, or a band’s page, or IFLScience, for example) and in the comment section there are several pages with scantily clad women called something like “Just Teen Stuff” or “Funny Memes”, and a comment with a million emoticons that says something to the effect of
Must be the same scam, but marketed towards a different audience. Come to think of it, they probably know I’m in my 30s now and don’t send me direct friend requests anymore.
Maybe they get paid for views by advertisers if they have more followers?
What’s even weirder is when someone posts a private message on a message board like this one saying they liked my profile and am interested in getting to know me better. Really? What about y completely empty profile did you find compelling?
Must be fishing for a scam.
It’s this. The more followers/friends/etc. you have, the more you can charge to host advertising. It’s the New Economy.
It’s not put on their page. It’s put on your page.
I accidentally put one into a group I manage, and they immediately put up an ad for sunglasses.
It’s a pretty stupid form of marketing: I get a notification for any posts, and take them down and ban the user. I doubt they get a half dozen views for all their effort.
I know a few people that admin large pages. They get offered money quite often to take over their page. Although in turn many of those offers are scams, having a page or profile with a lot of likes is worth money by way of advertising.
For the most part you don’t really “host” advertising on Facebook, but the more friends you have, the higher the click through you can get, typically into some kind of “funnel” or lead generation thing that might pay per lead/form filled out and/or traffic to a site that is monetized with other ads or affiliate offers.
There are even some programs like “MyLikes” that I see verified accounts of real celebrities (often the “sexy” ones like B-actresses, wrestlers, bikini models) using, where they display “viral” articles that only show up in the Facebook feed but nowhere on the profile. These companies create free sites/domains and pay commissions based on traffic.
There’s also something to be said for boosting brand/website value by having “personal” social media connections that funnel “social signals.”
More likely “To blave” which, as we all know, means to bluff.
Then there are the companies which one can hire to supposedly increase one’s social media presence via friend requests.* Win/win for the friendbots.
*I know a local musician who hired at least one of these.