Facebook invaded by spammers?
One of the big differentiators touted by Facebook has been that they’re a community. By only allowing people to register who can actually verify their email addresses, Facebook has been able to keep spam and rampant commercialism at bay.
Perhaps no more.
Prominent on the Facebook developers forum this morning is a thread that appears to have exposed fake Facebook profiles that are installing applications in response to flyer advertising. One developer claims to have received hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of registrations from these fakes. Does this mean that the Facebook identity mechanism has been cracked? Is this a harbinger of spam to come?
Here are a few of the fakes discovered.
October 16th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
That’s one of the advantages of LinkedIn’s “old boys/girls club” - you can’t got unnoticed because of the company you keep.
October 16th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
I guess so, Mitch. Facebook was supposed to be like that too.
October 17th, 2007 at 11:26 am
[...] Alec Saunders has passed along the news that there is concern in the Facebook developer forums that Facebook is being invaded by spammers. We’ll see - even more than Google, Facebook is vulnerable to bad behaviour of this [...]
December 31st, 2007 at 5:13 am
[...] 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 [...]