Finding info from Facebook

[BigGingerBob]

Hello,

My wife just received a threatening message on Facebook.
The profile has no friends, no pictures or any information.

The only person who we can think of is the wife of her brother. He married a scummy drunk who gets aggressive all the time.

I just want to confirm who this is as he's denying anything to do with him.

Is there anything that can be accessed? Just an email or phone number?

The message added 'What goes around comes around, we know where you live.' pretty intimidating considering we have two very young children and I work away a lot.


Just to add, we haven't done anything!

[eein]

Unless they've put some identifying info on the profile then you won't be able to find out who it is.

Facebook will not tell you (indeed they are not allowed to). In theory you can report it to the police and they can make a request to Facebook to find out who it is, however even then the Police cannot tell you who it is unless there's a need to do so. Unfortunately what you've received is unlikely to reach the threshold of interest with the Police for them to do this, and even if they did it is likely Facebook will refuse to provide the information to the Police.

If it really bothers you, and you're willing to take the time, hassle and risk of making things worse, you could interact with the person and try to get them to unwittingly give up some info.

[eein]

.... having thought about it, if you want to get full investigation style, there is a long shot way of inferring identities by using the Facebook algorithms against it. When someone contacts you or friends you, you will gain a connection to them in their social graph, and therefore also to other people that profile has contacted. So *if* that profile has been used by the person to contact others as well, then you sometimes will pick up suggestions for them as friends. If you can monitor your suggested friends before and after something like this you can sometimes infer the other person's contacts which can give you a hint to who they are. Of course any other activity you do on Facebook during this will also affect these connections and could confuse the picture. If you wanted to go full investigator and had the coding skills, you could scrape your suggested friends list on a daily basis and then do some clustering analytics to look at the emering patterns.

[interstellar]

I was going to say the same. I would monitor “people you might know” as often if they look at your profile they show up there.

[hidetheelephants]

BigGingerBob said:

'What goes around comes around, we know where you live.'

It's all a bit "hollyoaks/eastenders/insert TV soap of choice"; if they really were intent on doing you harm they would have done it, the messager is most likely a sad shut-in who would cross the road to avoid you in real life, even assuming it's someone you know and not just a random weirdo. Block the sender, increase the privacy settings on your social media so you don't receive messages from anyone other than friends and move on with your life.

[BigGingerBob]

Yes it's all a bit dramatic.

It could be some random weirdo but the cover photo is an AI one of a dog these people own.
We should probably just forget about it. My wife is flip flopping between not caring and being upset (so we know it's actually upset her).

I don't understand people.

Thanks for the responses guys!

[Timothy Bucktu]

I would just ignore at this stage. If they're messaging on Facebook, they're probably too stupid to actually do anything physical.
If it happens again...report it to the Police. They're quite keen on policing Facebook these days!

[joropug]

Some time ago now I used facebook for investigations as part of my work - you could put a phone number or email address in the search function and it would bring up a profile associate with it.

I can't imagine that still works but worth a try, I don't have facebook to test it.

[The Gauge]

Timothy Bucktu said:

report it to the Police. They're quite keen on policing Facebook these days!

Err, no they aren't. The reason people think that the police would rather deal with hurty words than 'real crime' is because there is usually an audit trail left by the sender that identifies them, so they don't really have much choice but to deal with them, but trust me, they really don't want to.

The police will only be interested (and even then, not really) if you are wanting to pursue a prosecution against the sender of the message, such as for malicious communications etc. They won't look into it just to satisfy your curiosity. Nothing takes up more of their time, or wastes their time than social media posts, usually tit for tat unpleasant messages, kind of like school playground arguments but part way through the investigation the victim withdraws their complaint, usually because the they have also sent an unpleasant message back and will be facing being investigated themselves. The usual offenders and victims are often the type of people who live dysfunctional lives, drink blue fizzy pop, have a broken washing machine in their front garden and catch taxis everywhere.

Not aimed at the OP, but in general if the recipients of 'hurty words' messages simply just ignored them or changed their own profile etc then the police would have more time to deal with other things.

Edited by The Gauge on Monday 4th August 11:19

[BigGingerBob]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

It's shaping up to be quite a story!

Once we know everything I'll share it here as it's quite funny how stupid people can be.

People seem much more reluctant to have mobile numbers associated with Facebook these days

[Far Cough]

Report to FB and Block .... Move on with life

[Dr Mike Oxgreen]

Do three things:

1) Block them.
2) Make sure all your profile’s visibility settings are “Friends” or tighter, not “Friends of friends”.
3) Forget about it.

[megaphone]

Dr Mike Oxgreen said:

Do three things:

1) Block them.
2) Make sure all your profile s visibility settings are Friends or tighter, not Friends of friends .
3) Forget about it.

4) Delete Facebook and any other 'social media'