Oz firm selling Facebook friends by the thousands

MELBOURNE - As part of a controversial scheme to expose users to online marketing, an Aussie company called uSocial is offering to sell off Facebook friends by the thousands.

The Brisbane-based company is best known for buying votes on social news service Digg, selling followers on Twitter, and running large marketing campaigns on social media.

And now, it is selling off friends and fans on Facebook in batches of 1000 to 10,000, and the price of the service will range from 197 dollars to 1297 dollars.

Leon Hill, uSocial founder and chief executive, said that the “friends” were not spam accounts, but users whom they had personally approached.

“We search Facebook and look at profiles of people who are already selling a similar product or service and people who are friends or fans of them,” News.com.au quoted him as saying.

“If (the user is) friends with more than one of those type of people than we can obviously see that that’s someone who would be interested in our client’s service.”

“All we do is send them a welcome message or friend request from the client. The Facebook user will see that - if they decide to go ahead and add that person as a friend or a fan then they will, if not, then they won’t.”

“In the end, it’s always up to the user,” he added.

Recently, Twitter tried to shut down uSocial, accusing the service of spamming, but the founder of the company, Leon Hill, denied the claim saying that it uses people to spread the word on behalf of his clients.

He added he would just move to another server if one was shut down.

Facebook has not yet commented on the issue. (ANI)