Ask HN: Anyone else seeing an influx of Nigerian scammers in Facebook groups?

[hornbaker]

I admin a niche FB group for golfers, more specifically for owners of a particular brand of launch monitor / golf sim software that runs around $3-5K to install in your home. A normal day usually sees around 25 legit requests to join the group.

Over the last 3-4 weeks, I’ve been getting around 100 requests/day to join from mostly Nigerian individuals who joined Facebook within the last couple of months. Most of them are members already of hundreds of unrelated groups and never answer my simple signup question, or do so in their own language.

Is everyone dealing with this, or is my group special? Do you think they’re bots?