Answer First of all, don't panic. If what's happening to you is what I
think, your own personal information hasn't been compromised. You
haven't actually been hacked at all.
There's a basic, garden-variety scam that happens on Facebook. A scammer
copies your profile's photo. They then set up an account using the same
name as you. They then scour your 'friends' list and send them 'friend'
invitations, using their newly-formed fake account that has your name
and, it seems, your photo.This is very common. What then happens is that
at least a couple of your friends, who may not use Facebook that much
but dip in every month or so, will see that 'friend' request and assume
that some glitch in the system disconnected them. So they'll accept the
'friend' request without looking down too much through the fake account
(which will have no other photos and probably no other 'friends'). The
next thing to occur is that they'll get a 'Messenger' message from this
new account with anything that ranges from 'Hi, how are you?' to some
request for something. As I said, this is a very common, low-level scam.
It happens to almost everyone I know on Facebook. But it's not one that
compromises your own personal data in any way, but could lure one or two
of your friends – the non-savvy ones – into a scamadjacent scenario.
Common scam: requests
The way to deal with it is to report the impersonation account. Your
opportunity to do so will typically happen when one of your actual
friends tells you they just got a strange message from you. You can then
ask them to report that account (on a phone, it's the three dots at the
top right hand of the screen). And you should do the same if you see a
'friend' request from someone you're already friends with.
It's a fair question as to why Facebook doesn't do more to cut this
stuff out. With all of its AI power, why can't it detect an obvious copy
of a profile photo to query it? My guess is that, in time, it will get
better at stamping this out.
In the meantime, don't worry too much about it. This is one of those
things that we'll all just learn to spot and get used to, like text
message scams about unpaid tolls.
Email your questions to aweckler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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