Cyclists Beware, there has been a sudden increase of fake Facebook friend requests going around the cycling community. For weeks now, cyclists have been bombarded by daily requests from accounts that look to be from other cyclists.
The spammers are creating accounts with profile pictures of cyclists and then sending requests to cyclists who also have profile pictures depicting participation in the sport.
Once they have access to your account we suspect they are pulling your personal pictures so they can create more accounts in the same manner and use them for whatever nefarious plans they have.
Do you part to help stop the spread of these accounts:
-Don’t accept requests from people you don’t know, even if they are riding a bike.
-If you don’t have friends in common, treat it as a suspect invite.
-If you do have friends in common, then your friends might be suckers, make sure you practice due diligence.
-A quick glance at their profiles should make it obvious that they are spammers. If they only have friends on their page that are cyclists, clearly just created the account, have not really posted anything, etc., they are not real. Actually take a moment to investigate the account.
-Deny the requests and report them as spam.
-Wait them out, if you simply wait a few hours or a day the request will most likely disappear as others mark them as spammers.
We’ve noticed a lot of these on our club page. Most of the time they will use women’s accounts, as they are most likely to be accepted. Once in the group they will post a few messages to integrate themselves in and then start adding photos of cheap fake products like Oakley knockoff sunglasses and tagging up as many people as they can in the picture. You’d think this would be time consuming but they’ve got automated bots that can churn thousands of these out an hour. Annoying isn’t the word!
Nice one for bringing this to a wider audience. Facebook really don’t seem that fussed about stopping it.
Regards
Tony
Bikesy