I’m sure you’ve received them too. Friend requests from sexy bikini clad women who suddenly wants to be your friend. Or maybe you’ve received a friend request from a smiling man from Nigeria, who desperately wants to be your friend, so that you can help him with some money transfers?
For a while I received 10-11 such requests per day. However, over the last two years, I haven’t received a single one. And this despite me hearing others talk about how many they get. However, there is a way to stop receiving such requests. And you can stop them via this very simple trick:
- Go to your Facebook settings:
. - Choose Privacy in the left side menu:
. - Find the section called How people can find and contact you:
. - Behind Who can send you friend requests? you find a link called Edit. Click on it:
. - In the drop down menu that appears, choose Friends of friends:
Now only people who are friends with any of your friends can add you on Facebook. This completely eliminated the problem I had with such fake friend requests.
Let’s say you meet someone in real life who wants to be your friend, but she can’t add you because you have no friends in common. In that case you can just go to the setting above and change it to Everyone.
I did just this yesterday after meeting a woman in Paris who wanted to add me. However, it took only ten minutes from I changed that setting until I had my first fake friend request! So I immediately changed the setting back again after my new Facebook friend had been added.
What did you think about this tip? Good? Bad? Want to add something? Use the comment section below!
How could I set up a questions for people wanting to send me a request and if they answer wrong it rejects them. That would be super helpful
That’s a good idea. However, AFAIK, Facebook does not offer this functionality.
Thank you SO MUCH!! I was getting several fake requests EACH DAY… This really solved the problem!
While we’re at it, might I add that another similar problem is receiving fake group messages on Instagram. To solve that, just go to Settings > Privacy > Messages > Allow others to add you to groups > Only people you follow.
Finally may I live to see a spam-free day! Thanks again
Happy to help! 🙂
Thanks for your valuable help.
How do you stop illegitimate friend requests? I got one for my sister who died 6 years ago.
Change your sister’s account into a memorial page. You can also set that only friends of friends should be able to send her friend requests.
Thank you, I have wasted countless hours trying to find which friends are real and my family and local friends avoid my spammy page. In messenger it’s very important to my livelyhood and security from ID theft to have a network of genuinely interested Facebook members who would like to date me, hire me or just see my music online. Could have been avoided by verification by Facebook but I will write an article on my blog about that myself!