Facebook Is No Longer Safe From Spammers

I Guess It Was Inevitable, Right?

One of the reasons that I dropped MySpace in favor of Facebook as my primary means of social networking with friends was that I grew stick and tired of all of the spammy requests, hackers and scammers that now dominate the platform. I want to be friends with hot chicks just as much as the next guy, but I know when it is too good to be true. To date, I have not yet received any fake friend requests or witnessed any possible hacker attacks on Facebook, but according to pal Alec Saunders (whose company is behind the awesome Free Conference Calls application) it looks like the spammers have set-up shop on Facebook.

Many are probably wondering why someone would want to create fake profiles and execute widespread add to friend requests. The reason is simply money. These spammers, usually driven by the pursuit of affiliate marketing dollars, will probably look to clog your news feed with all sorts of links to things such as viagara, penis pills or some other high payout affiliate offering. It is both disappoint and alarming to here that we all will soon have to deal with this, but in my opinion it was only a matter of time.

Here are some screen shots of the fake profiles:

You can read more about these developments in the Facebook developers forums.

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