Viral Facebook hoax has users believing accounts were hacked
Don’t do it. Don’t send out blast posts telling your friends on Facebook that you’ve been hacked.
You haven’t.
Over the weekend, you might have seen a wave of panicked friends in your Facebook news feeds posting warnings: Their accounts were hacked, don’t accept friend requests from their accounts. Or maybe, even more alarming, you received a private message warning you that your account had been compromised. The warning spread in the form of a message, sent from a friend or “friend.” The message claims that the sender received a suspicious friend request from you, and that the proper way to address this disturbing news is to immediately share the message they sent to you with all your friends, writes Abby Ohlheiser in the Washington Post.
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It reads something like this:
“Hi … I actually got another friend request from you which I ignored so you may want to check your account. 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.”
While account cloning is a real thing, the viral copy/paste message warning about it is likely not from a cloned account. If you got one of those messages, there are a couple of things you can do: First, check on your friend’s account and make sure it’s not a clone of their real account (if you search the person’s name and find two completely identical accounts, that’s a pretty good sign that one is a clone). And if you were messaged by a “clone” of your friend, then report that account to Facebook.
To read the complete story click here.
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