I think it's legit though. I've found a bunch of shinies simply by grinding encounters in the Friend Safari. Sometimes I go in and find one within the first five battles. By comparison I've hatched like 3000 eggs or something and only ever found two shinies by breeding. One of them was dumb luck because I was breeding for IVs and it produced a random shiny.Lucky. I still haven't seen one (though admittedly I haven't been playing much). I remember reading a while back that the shiny rates were upped for the Friend Safari, though I think that was speculation based off how many people were finding shinies there.
I've been playing Pokemon since it first released here in the West and in that time I've seen a grand total of...1 shiny in the wild...And I killed it because we didn't know what shiny's were back then...
It was a Shiny Geodude within the first hour of playing Silver when I first got it. Wasn't sure why it had a sparkly animation and I just passed it off as a regular new thing in Pokemon. I didn't have any Pokeballs so I just killed it and carried on none the wiser...
The only shiny's I've ever had are ones within the game such as the red Gyrados or event Pokemon that are given to you.