Facebook posts and messages claim to allow a Facebook user see which of their friends visits (or stalks) their Facebook profile.
Such messages can appear as posts in groups or pages, or they may appear as comments on posts. They could be posted by people you don’t know or may appear to have been posted by people you are connected with on Facebook. Typically such claims are accompanied by a link that the user need to click in order to find out who visits their profile.
Examples can be seen below –
Check Who Visited Your Profile Recently. App Link @
Who are your top STALKERS? Find out which of your friends are stalking your every move!
The notion that Facebook users can see a list of other users who have been visiting their profile has been around for a number of years, yet it has never been possible on the social networking platform.
However, over the years, many scammers have purported to offer such a feature as a way of tricking Facebook users into compromising their privacy or security.
In most cases we’ve investigated, the lure of seeing who visits your Facebook profile has been used to trick Facebook users into installing rogue Facebook apps. These are programs that connect to (and can access some parts of) a user’s Facebook account. Many such apps request permission to post from the user’s Facebook account, which helps the rogue app spread as it posts links to itself while pretending to be the owner of the Facebook account that installed it.
The apps themselves may pretend to be legitimate by offering up a list of a user’s Facebook friends, either by random or by measuring the amount of public interaction with them (i.e. comments, likes) but it will not be by how often they visit your profile since this is not possible.
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However the lure of being able to see who visits your Facebook profile has also been used in some instances to trick Facebook users into visiting external websites and download harmful malware. Or they could be used to trick Facebook users into visiting spammy websites that try and trick users into completing spammy surveys in order for the website to harvest and sell contact information.
Many different scams have uses the ruse of checking who visits your profile in the past. Take this spammy Facebook app from 2015, for example, that tried to lure users into completing spammy questionnaires in order to unlock their “top stalkers”, only to find themselves giving their contact information to third party marketing companies. Or in 2016 another rogue Facebook app when viral, posting from peoples accounts, claiming to reveal who is “viewing your profile”.
Ultimately, these scams exist to trick users into installing rogue Facebook apps, malware or to extort information from them. Being able to check who visits your profile has never been a feature of Facebook, and any link, message, post, comment or email that purports to offer this feature is lying to you.