Facebook Friends list randomly getting bigger?

[kyle]

about 3 weeks ago, i had 194 friends or so. A few days ago, I had around 197 friends. Today, I have 204 friends. I have not accepted or even recieved any new friend requests. Can anyone explain this?

I am having these wild theories of Big Brother or scummy companies/people spying on me by somehow attaching themselves to my friends list. However, I am not as unobservant as one may think (just because I'm a college kid doesn't mean I have no idea what is going on around me haha), and I try to keep track of random things like license plate #'s and random mannerisms of the people I am around.

I'm a little paranoid like that, but then again one day it may come in handy, right? Haha anyways, anyone know why it might be increasing? Does it have anything to do with Groups or Lists that you can join/make?
Like I said, WILD theories haha
I am seeing this same question pop up a lot just recently (within the past hour) all over Yahoo Answers. I would really like to know what is causing this and what type of accounts are affected (only private friends only accounts or are public accounts affected too?)

[Josh]

Maybe you send friend requests out ages ago you forgot about and they have just accepted?

knowone is spying on you haha =P

[Daniel]

Friend Counts are Never accurate They go up and Down When people Return To Facebook from Reactivating there accounts the friend count tends to go up It Will Go Down if People Deactivate there accounts its just the way facebook is

[mary e]

Yay! Finally someone else who is having the same problem! But it's not great that it's a problem for you. FB has not returned any of my inquires for days now about this. I woke up 2 days ago and saw my friends list grew. They never sent a reply to my questions. I couldn't find anything online about it till your question. I know exactly how many friends I have and who they are. There's not a lot. I went to my list yesterday and finally thought I'd "unfriend" the deactivated accounts of friends in my list....remember these have never been in your friend count...they only show up when you click to see your list. My number dropped by 1 for each 1 I unfriended BUT I still have 1 "friend" unaccounted for and FB isn't getting back to me. Till then. I have set all settings to "Only Me" as I don't know who this "extra friend" is and what is visible. All deactivated accounts have been unfriended but there's still 1 out there. I suggest filling out a help form and complaining, but you probably won't get an answer back either. Hope you do though.

[Merrybeef077]

i know! the same thing happened to me today. yesterday, i had around 980 friends, but when i logged on a few minutes ago, it said i had 1,021 friends. like wtf?? i know that some people deactivate and reactivate their fb's on and off, but i still don't think THAT many people would do that all at once. so yeah, it is weird. hope we find out what's going on..