Has your Facebook account ever been cloned?

Well, (cloned in other words means) hacked? Mine was just recently. I didn’t give it too much thought because I was busy and didn’t have time to check out what was going on with it.

I checked and noticed that a number of my friends who I thought saw my updates regularly had accepted the connection. A number of others had checked with me to see if I had created a new account or whether mine had been cloned.

Today one of my younger cousins sent me a message on Facebook that included a picture that was definitely not me!!! See image. If you know me, you know that I have almost always been some shade of blonde!!  The person who cloned the account realized that I had not reported it and took the liberty of changing the images to something that they wanted to use. >>>

What this says to me is:

1. If a friend invites you to connect on any social media platform to which you are already connected to them, send a message and ask if they invited you. It should be a tip-off to the rip-off for them if they did not. (I do know that many people lose access to LinkedIn accounts and have to start over, so that might be the exception.)
2. If you begin getting a number of these messages, check out the particular platform for ways to report that type of misuse of the platform.
3. Don’t wait too long. Typically they can’t get too far,  but as you can see, they can make changes pretty rapidly.

For Facebook, I found the profile of the person who had cloned my account by searching my name. My profile is personalized with my name, so they couldn’t take that. 

1.  I went to the three dots looking for my options and saw just what I needed.

“Give feedback or report this profile”. Initially, I had just blocked it, but then realized, I couldn’t report it, so I had to unblock the profile.

2.  I answered a couple of questions:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. I received an email that said they received my request and within an hour (honestly I think it was faster, but the email timestamps say an hour), I received the follow-up email that said:

Hi Dee,

Thanks for letting us know about the profile you reported for pretending to be someone they’re not.

We removed the profile because it goes against our Community Standards for identity and privacy. We let the person who owns the profile know that it has been removed, but not who reported it.

Thanks, The Facebook Team

A couple of other things I did included, changed my password immediately after getting the first message from a friend. I also changed my cover image, because after they cloned my account, I felt like they wouldn’t be able to keep up with my changes.

My last bit of advice with this is make sure that the password you use for any social media accounts is not the same password you use for any sensitive log-in information like banking sites.

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