{"id":1083,"date":"2012-07-23T18:22:23","date_gmt":"2012-07-24T01:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/?p=1083"},"modified":"2012-07-23T18:22:23","modified_gmt":"2012-07-24T01:22:23","slug":"facebook-lessons-learned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/23\/facebook-lessons-learned\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Lessons Learned"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I got a friend request from my wife.\u00a0 It seemed strange, so I looked a little further into it.\u00a0 Turns out the account was fake and had been composed of all the publicly available information from her account.\u00a0 This included over 400 people who are her friends.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Here are two things you can do that will help prevent this from happening to you or your friends:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Don’t automatically accept ANY friend requests (especially suspicious ones) without doing a little research.<\/strong>\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If you find a fake account (like the one I did), please report it immediately<\/em> to both Facebook and your real friend who is being impersonated.\u00a0 Otherwise, they may never know someone is spoofing them.\u00a0 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.<\/li>\n
  2. Don’t make your friend list public.<\/strong>\u00a0 Think about it, by default Facebook lets you tell the world, “Here are 400 people that trust me”.\u00a0 That is very valuable information to an imposter.\u00a0 Facebook lets you hide your friend list from strangers, so an imposter can’t see who trusts you.\u00a0 It still shows mutual friends, so your real friends can still find you, but only if they already know people you know.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Please help make Facebook a safer place by following these two tips.\u00a0 Do it to protect yourself and do it to protect your friends.\u00a0 Please help educate your friends on Facebook so we can stop criminals from abusing the system.<\/p>\n

    Here are some images to show how to do these things:<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a>

    This is how to report a violation from someone's timeline.<\/p><\/div>\n

    To hide your friends from the public:<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a>

    From your own profile, click on your friend list.<\/p><\/div>\n

    \"\"<\/a>

    At the top, click "Edit" and then choose to only show your friends to your friends.<\/p><\/div>\n

    Here is an official and very helpful link that talks about reporting violations:<\/p>\n

    https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/help\/?faq=207209825981040&ref_query=fake+account#violations<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Yesterday, I got a friend request from my wife.\u00a0 It seemed strange, so I looked a little further into it.\u00a0 Turns out the account was fake and had been composed of all the publicly available information from her account.\u00a0 This included over 400 people who are her friends.\u00a0 We’ve reported the account and have been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13],"tags":[267,268],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8WrW-ht","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1083"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1091,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083\/revisions\/1091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}