Crime

In Friend Request, hacking is often portrayed in an unrealistic way. Marina often uses supernatural powers to "hack" into the accounts and electronic devices of Laura and her friends. Laura's friend Kobe, who was portrayed as being the "computer expert" of the friend group, tried to investigate Marina's invasion of Laura's account and discovered that the HTML code of her Facebook page had been replaced by strange cryptic symbols.

The hacking methods in this movie are unorthodox to say the least. Characters using their social media accounts were "hacked" by the ghost of Marina, shown by changing the words they were typing on their status to something Marina had typed. Another illogic form of hacking shown was all of the glitching on people's screens when Marina would hack into their systems. Whatever technology was being hacked into, either a phone or even medical monitors, would completely shut down unrealistically. When Kobe was in the computer room, he got hacked and all of the computers in the room glitched with different images of Marina's face. The methods of "ghost hacking" is completely fictitious and does not represent actual methods of hacking.

While the portrayal of cyber-crime in this film was quite unrealistic, it acts as a commentary of the effects of cyber-crime. While it is unlikely that someone would have their account supernaturally taken over, it is within the realm of possibility that someone's password could be stolen, allowing someone else to impersonate them on their accounts. In turn, they could experience the social consequences the Laura had faced in the film, including losing friendships and life opportunities due to unacceptable content being posted to the account.