facebook « Angie & Jim

Facebook Lessons Learnedby Jim

Mon
23 Jul 2012
6:07 pm0

Yesterday, I got a friend request from my wife. It seemed strange, so I looked a little further into it. Turns out the account was fake and had been composed of all the publicly available information from her account. This included over 400 people who are her friends. We’ve reported the account and have been doing our best to fix the damage, but it got me thinking about how easy it is for someone to masquerade as someone you trust. Here are two things you can do that will help prevent this from happening to you or your friends:

Don’t automatically accept ANY friend requests (especially suspicious ones) without doing a little research. 60 seconds looking at the timeline showed that the fraudulent account was only a few hours old and only had one photo (the public profile picture), clear indications this account was fake. If you find a fake account (like the one I did), please report it immediately to both Facebook and your real friend who is being impersonated. Otherwise, they may never know someone is spoofing them. If you do end up friending a scammer like this, they could collect all your shared Facebook information and create a duplicate of your account and try to scam all your friends with much more convincing data.
Don’t make your friend list public. Think about it, by default Facebook lets you tell the world, “Here are 400 people that trust me”. That is very valuable information to an imposter. Facebook lets you hide your friend list from strangers, so an imposter can’t see who trusts you. It still shows mutual friends, so your real friends can still find you, but only if they already know people you know.

Please help make Facebook a safer place by following these two tips. Do it to protect yourself and do it to protect your friends. Please help educate your friends on Facebook so we can stop criminals from abusing the system.

Here are some images to show how to do these things: