Fake facebook friend requests

How much can Facebook be trusted nowadays? On a regular basis, I keep receiving friend requests from people I already know to have a Facebook account. When I dig deeper into these requests, I find that they come from newly created accounts with either very few friends or none at all, and with timelines that are completely empty. Should I be careful with accepting such requests? Absolutely.

In fact, these are classic warning signs of fake profiles, and there are plenty of risks if we are to accept them blindly. Scammers and spammers set up these ghost accounts precisely to gain access to our personal information. Once “accept” is clicked, they can peek into whatever we’ve set to “Friends only”: photos, contact details, snippets of our lives that we wouldn’t ordinarily share with strangers. That information is enough to be exploited. Sometimes for phishing purposes, sometimes for identity theft.

The danger doesn’t stop there. A fake “friend” can start messaging us with links, often dressed up as something harmless or even urgent. If we're not careful, we might end up with malware lodged in our devices, malware that quietly siphon away our data. There’s also the trick of impersonation: scammers pretending to be someone we know, sending messages to our real friends asking for money or sensitive information.

This isn’t just theory either. Several years ago, it happened to my wife. One day, I received a Facebook friend request under her name. I was puzzled: why on earth would she be opening a second account when she barely touched the first one? I asked her, and she flatly denied it. Then I showed her the request, and her reaction said it all: she hadn’t created the account. The giveaway was the profile picture. It was one of hers, but the choice of image was questionable. Controversial, even. That was the moment we both realised she had been impersonated. I immediately told her to lodge a complaint with Facebook, and eventually, that bogus account was taken down.

Cases like this are textbook examples of account cloning, where a scammer copies a name and a photo and then tries to worm their way into your circle of friends. Once accepted, they can start spreading their scams under the guise of someone you trust.

Over time, I’ve learnt to look out for red flags. A profile with very few friends and no posts is the most obvious. But there are subtler signs too, such as the account might be brand new with hardly any history, the profile picture suspiciously generic or lifted from elsewhere on the internet, or the page lacking the sort of personal touches a genuine account would naturally have, like school, workplace or location. very few mutual friends is another telling giveaway. And on the rare occasion the profile does have posts, they often read as oddly repetitive or littered with strange links.

So what to do? The simplest answer is to ignore the request. I don’t give a fake account even the faintest toehold into my social circle. If I’m certain it’s bogus, I alert the friend that has been impersonated. If there are mutual friends listed, I check with them directly, outside of Facebook if possible, before telling them to unfriend the account fast although it may already be too late to prevent any data loss.

For me, the lesson is clear: vigilance is the only safeguard. The Facebook of today is not the same platform it was in the past. It’s more crowded, more complicated and more riddled with traps. It's unfortunate, but one careless click can open a door I’d rather keep shut.