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.