What are these girls up to?

January 21, 2010 10:17 AM

Every couple of weeks a different ~20 YO girl with a provocative picture, young enough to be my daughter, will try to friend me on Facebook. This squicks me out and I can't hit the ignore button fast enough. I can't help but think it's a precurser to some kind of scam. What are these girls up to?
posted by Daddy-O to computers & internet (12 answers total)

It's just spam - "she" want you to look at "her" pay-for-porn page. They're not real people (I mean, obviously a real person was photographed, but it's nobody's personal account.)
posted by Tomorrowful at 10:18 AM on January 21, 2010

Get you to look at their webcam or webpage or whatever it is that has ads on it so they can make money?
posted by RustyBrooks at 10:18 AM on January 21, 2010

Yeah, it's facebook porn spam. Same thing happens on twitter.
posted by The Deej at 10:21 AM on January 21, 2010

FWIW If you are on Twitter it's more like once a day. These are basically all fake accounts designed to entice you into clicking a link hidden away on the profile somehwere, which will be some kind of spammy/malware type deal. I doubt very much any actual "girls" are involved.
posted by Artw at 10:22 AM on January 21, 2010

That's what I figured, but I thought it might be even more sinister than that. Thanks everyone.
posted by Daddy-O at 10:32 AM on January 21, 2010

Same thing happens on OKCupid too. I get a couple profile visits a week from some twenty-nothing from California with a downblouse MySpace pose. They invariably say something like, "My sexier pictures already got taken down but you can still see them at www.camwhoresFTW.blah.blah."
posted by Babblesort at 10:33 AM on January 21, 2010

Interesting. I never get Facebook spam friends, while I do get plenty of twitter spam friends. Maybe it depends on how visible you are in Facebook, like whether you are a fan of pages and such.
posted by smackfu at 10:41 AM on January 21, 2010

Just as an idea (which you probably won't be interested in given what you said about automatically clicking ignore), you could do what I sometimes do when I don't recognize the person who's trying to add me. I take 5 seconds to send them this message:

Subject: Friend request

Hi, you added me as a friend. How do we know each other?

That way, if, by some chance, the person is actually legitimate, they can write back and explain. I think one person once wrote to tell me they were a fan of my blog. Other than that, no one has written back.
posted by Jaltcoh at 11:19 AM on January 21, 2010

I was wondering this myself. One of the "girls" who friended me had 50 friends, 90% of them named Chris or Dylan.
posted by djb at 11:45 AM on January 21, 2010

There's one "girl" in my network who's doing this and she has over 1,000 friends now. None of her info is publicly available. We were theorizing as to whether she could be a cop or something, since a lot of people have pictures of themselves drinking at age 17-20 or so on FB, smoking pot, etc, but that's all speculative.
posted by NoraReed at 12:21 PM on January 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

Another possibility is that the add is an attempt to perform some form of data mining on Facebook accounts.
posted by OwenMarshall at 12:23 PM on January 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

Most likely it is an affiliate marketer using an automated Facebook account creator/spammer tool or possibly even a hacked account. It goes out there and spreads itself through friend networks and tries to get you to visit a link which is usually hidden behind a redirect or two.

The end result is either a site that tries to load malicious code onto your machine, or a porn site the person is trying to get you to sign up for under their affiliate link so they can make a commission.

Either way, just report them to Facebook.
posted by Elminster24 at 2:10 PM on January 21, 2010