Posted:
By JAMIE TUCKER Consumer Technology Reporter
If it feels like you’re constantly seeing friends post, “I’ve been hacked — don’t accept friend requests from me,” you’re not imagining things.
New research shows fake Facebook accounts and impersonation scams have exploded, up more than 1,000% in the past year.
It’s not that your friends are careless — it’s that certain habits make them easy targets. And the more you use Facebook, the more vulnerable you might be.
Here’s how the cloning scams usually work:
Cybercriminals create copycat profiles using stolen photos and publicly available information. Then, they send friend requests to people on that person’s list, or even their followers, and before long, they’ve built a convincing fake network.
That’s how one scammer can impersonate someone convincingly enough to trick dozens, or even hundreds, of people.
How to protect yourself:
● Stop accepting duplicate friend requests and don’t accept people you don’t recognize.
● Check your privacy settings. If your friends list is public, scammers can easily duplicate your network. In settings, limit your visibility to “Friends” or “Only Me.”
● Review your followers. You might not realize how many people are quietly tracking your posts without being actual friends. If you’ve received a friend request from someone you don’t know, even if you decline the request, the person sending it becomes your follower by default. And followers see everything you post. Go into your friends list and click “followers” and block any you don’t know or that looks suspicious.
● Tighten friend request settings. The default is public, but you can limit it to “Friends of Friends” to shrink your exposure.
Also, don’t assume you’ll see if someone copies your account ,scammers often block the person they’re impersonating to avoid being caught.
And here’s a key point: this isn’t a hack in the traditional sense. If your account is cloned, the scammer likely didn’t break in. They just scraped information from your public profile. That’s why changing your password won’t help.
Be aware that about 5% of all Facebook profiles are fake. Meta removes billions of fake profiles every year but the crooks continue creating them and using the tactic to clone and cheat Facebook users.
