Did you get ‘hacked’ on facebook or know someone who did? What we’ve seen a lot of recently is Facebook Cloning, where your profile is duplicated, then the hacker/scammer pretends to be you and sends friend requests and messages to your friends. Usually their intention is to try to get personal information, send malicious links, or ask for money from your friends.
Typically you’ll know if you’ve been cloned because a friend will let you know that they received a message or a friend request from you, and they feel it’s suspicious.
What to Do if You Were Cloned:
If your profile gets cloned, make a public post and send messages to your contacts asking them not to respond to the friend request or message.
If they did get a friend request or message, ask them to report the fake profile:
- Visit the fake account’s profile and click the three dots over on the right
- Click ‘Find support or report profile’
- Click ‘Pretending to be Someone’
- Complete the next steps to report the fake account
- After Facebook receives the report, they will check it out and remove it
How to Help Prevent Being Cloned:
- Increase you privacy settings. You may be allowing scammers to see too much of your profile, such as photos, posts, etc., which allows them to recreate a more realistic profile. By increasing your privacy settings (making posts and photos visible to friends only), you reduce the information they can copy.
- Hide your friends list. By default, Facebook sets your friends list to Public. If you’ve never changed this setting, the scammer will be able to see your friends and send friend requests and messages to them. By making your friends list visible to only you, they won’t be able to see who you’re connected with.
While scammers are smart and these suggestions do not guarantee you won’t be cloned, they can certainly help.