Facebook Hoax Tricks Users to Believe that Hackers have Hacked their Account

In a recent incident, the social media website was again in news; this time, a Facebook scam is tricking people to believe that the hackers have hacked their Facebook account.

The scam floated through the Facebook in message form, which says that it has come from a 'friend'. The hoax message which went viral on Facebook, early in October, claimed that the sender is in receipt of a friend request from the receiver's duplicate account. The hoax message also urged the receiver to forward the same message to other friends in their list as well, which further helps in spreading the hoax and creating panic among Facebook users.

The message that has been floating throughout Facebook goes like: "Hi...I actually got another friend request from you which I ignored so you may want to check your account". The message further said that "Hold your finger on the message until the forward button appears...then hit forward and all the people you want to forward too....I had to do the people individually. PLEASE DO NOT ACCEPT A NEW friendship FROM ME AT THIS TIME"

As per the fact-checking site called Snopes, this incidence is a perfect example of how Facebook pirates catch hold of innocent people with the help of cloned accounts, which are created by setting new accounts having same name as well as identical profile picture of a Facebook user. After creating the fake account, the spammer send friend requests to the original friends of account holder, hence giving a feeling that it has come from the victim's account.

Snopes adds, "once those friend requests are accepted, the scammers can then spread messages which appear to originate from the targeted account, luring that person's friends into propagating malware, falling for phishing schemes, or disclosing personal information that can be used for identity theft".

Though as per the fact-checking site, the request may be coming from the genuine users as well, but if a same message is sent to thousands of users that is an indication that the message is a spam.

The simple way to avoid falling prey to these scams are just ignore the messages if you think they are spam. To be doubly sure that your account is not being misused, one should search his/her name on Facebook. In case one finds that his/her account has been cloned, the matter should immediately be reported to Facebook officials.

» SPAMfighter News - 10/23/2018