Social Engineering Challenge 1: Friend Request

My task at hand was to get a complete stranger to friend request me or follow me on a social media site.

I thought of some ways  i could possibly do this. One way i thought i could do this is by simply friend requesting a total stranger. If they question who i was and why i was requesting them i would make up a story using tidbits of the information they provided about themselves on the social media site. Then I started thinking that i did not want to use my real profile and have them be all in my personal space, to only later delete them.

Then I thought about creating a new  "fake" profile, but I put alot of thought into that avenue and realized that wouldn't work either because of catfishing, people look for many things when they are friend requested by strangers: 1) how many friends one has; if it's pretty low, it possibly could be a fake page. 2) Mutual friends; that's even a bigger red flag because then they are wondering where is this coming from and who is it coming from. 3) Pictures; does the requestor look familiar, how many pictures do they have?

I think both ways are very deceitful. I would be fabricating two different stories to convince the individuals that my request is worth accepting. In turn, they would possibly accept my request under those terms and invite me into their personal space; space which they may share family, information, whereabouts, pictures, etc.

Ultimately i did not pull this off because i totally couldn't put aside my own morals, but maybe some of you wouldn't have a problem doing so.