My sister died a few years ago. A couple of months later, someone created an account with her name and profile pic and started inviting family members. Quite frankly, I would have been ready to brawl with this person if I were in a room with them.
I feel very badly for your friend. Unfortunately, those completely benign actions look identical to a common identity theft pattern.
That happens regularly with various family members who already have IG/FB accounts. I always have to hop on our local Signal group and warn everyone that there's another fake clone account trying to scam people. Some of us try to report the profile, but the process has become increasingly frustrating, and often doesn't even work (sorry, we couldn't blah-blah-blah so we can't/won't do anything about it). Sometimes we just have to let the scammer be, block them, and warn people outside of Signal that there are scammers running around with our family members' names. It's a total shitshow.