Protect Yourself (and Your Friends) Against Facebook Impostors

Have you ever received a Facebook friend request from someone you thought you were already friends with? Did you accept the request and then discover that you were now friends with the same person twice?

It happened to me a few months ago. I went ahead and accepted the friend request and then messaged the person to say hello. The response I received in return was not the “voice” of my friend at all, and it tipped me off. I alerted her, and she reported it to Facebook.

This type of attack on Facebook users takes a legitimate user and duplicates that person’s profile. Then, the hacker sends friend requests to the legitimate users’ friends and gains access to the personal information of those friends.

Here’s what you can do to make it more difficult for those slimy hackers out there. First, manage your friend list so that only your friends can see your friends.

It’s very simple to do. Just go to your friend list, click on the pencil icon on the right side, and select Edit Privacy. You’ll have several choices for your friend-list audience. I changed mine so that only my friends can see my friend list.

Next, if you receive a friend request that seems odd, check your friend list to see if that person is already listed there. If they are, let them know that they’ve been hacked and how they can notify Facebook.

Notifying Facebook about an impostor is easy. Just go to the impostor’s Facebook page, and click on the ellipsis in the upper right hand corner. From the dropdown, select Report. Then follow the prompts, and select the option to report an account pretending to be you.

Of course be sure to post what happened on your timeline, so that your friends don’t fall victim to this scam, too.

Questions? Let me know if any of these instructions seem confusing.

Ann Silverthorn (Twitter: @annsilverthorn) is a versatile blogger who also writes about a wide variety of topics in numerous genres, including non-fiction, fiction, poetry, travel, and grant writing.