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Wednesday, 16 March 2011 00:49

Teen's Facebook party cancelled

A NSW teen says she has called in the police after her Facebook birthday party invitation went viral with almost 200,000 people threatening to show up.

The 15-year-old's home and mobile

phones have been bombarded with calls and text messages from strangers because she had put her mobile number on a Facebook event birthday party invite that was made publicly available.

Her home address was also listed, which was how many uncovered her home telephone number, she said.

Advertisement: Story continues below 'Never doing this again'

Not identifying the girl to prevent further publicity of the event, Fairfax spoke to her yesterday via Facebook before she decided to deactivate her profile.

"I'm never doing this again," she said. "I'm so scared and now I have the police called."

On the Facebook invitation, the girl said she didn't have enough time to invite everyone. She therefore asked for people, if they knew someone who might like to go, to invite them on her behalf.

She also said that the event was going to be an "open house" party as long as it didn't "get out of hand". She told Fairfax that she did this because only two people showed up to the last party she held.

Event goes viral

But the event invitation spread rapidly on the internet to thousands and so she quickly shut it down. However, shortly after doing so it was recreated by an impostor, the girl said.

The impostor copied the information from the original invitation and pasted it on to a fake one.

The fake Facebook event created by that impostor is the one that has now gone even more viral than the original one, which attracted just a few thousand rather than a few hundred thousand.

Yesterday morning about 30,000 were listed to attend and by late yesterday evening more than 175,000. By 8.45am today there were almost 200,000.

Fairfax could not make contact with her parents yesterday but the girl said her mother and father knew about the party she was going to hold although they did not know that it was going to be an "open house" party.

Sydney's Daily Telegraph did, however, manage to get in contact with her father, who said his daughter was "an innocent victim" who intended to invite just "a few friends" but did not know how to use the privacy settings on Facebook correctly.

Fairfax verified the girl's identity after she added the author of this report as a friend on Facebook. It was clear her account was not a fake and had not been set up recently as it had a history of posts and photos that extended back to early last year. But by late yesterday afternoon it appeared to have been shut down.

Before it was shut down, the girl told people on the fake Facebook event invitation that police had been called in to help.

Last modified Wednesday, 16 March 2011 01:01

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