On Facebook it's boom of cloned accounts thanks to a new scam generated by a group of hackers, here's how to recognize fraudulent messages not to be trusted
For Facebook it's not exactly a good time as far as information security is concerned. After the scandal of the flaw that caused the loss of data for more than 90 million users (and that could cost Mark Zuckerberg's company almost 2 billion dollars for GDPR violation), members of the social platform have once again ended up in the crosshairs of a new hacker scam.
For the past few days, in fact, several IT security companies have been launching alerts about the abnormal activity of some Facebook profiles. Taking advantage of the level of attention generated by the data theft that has affected 90 million profiles, in fact, some hackers have devised a scam that soon became viral based on a fake alarm message. The fraudulent message comes to us from another contact, who has already fallen into the trap. Our friend, who is actually just forwarding an automated message generated by a hacker, tells us that he has received a friend request from us, which is strange since we are already friends and that perhaps it would be appropriate to check our account by clicking on the link attached to the text of the message. Obviously, if we click it, we won't be redirected to any official page for account management but will end up in a scam site created ad hoc by cyber criminals.
How to recognize the new scam on Facebook
Recognizing this kind of scam on social media is simple. Let's start with the text which is this: "Hi ..... I actually received another friend request from you yesterday ... which I ignored so you might want to check your account. Hold your finger on the message until the Next button appears ... then press forward and all the people you want to forward .... I had to do the people individually. Good luck!" You can clearly see that this is a translator-generated message. The meaning in Italian is very cryptic, not to mention that in some parts there is no real full meaning. The purpose is just to get people to get scared about an account issue and click on the link. But let's remember never to click on any link, whether on Facebook, email or WhatsApp if we are not sure about the reliability of the message.
What happens if we click on that link? Simple, we will be redirected to a malicious site where every information of our Facebook profile will be cloned. A real identity theft in full swing. And then of course our fake profile will be used to scam all our contacts with the same technique that led us to fall into the trap of cyber criminals. But why do hackers want to steal our identity on the famous social media? Simple, because then they will have a long list of fake accounts created in seconds that they can reuse to scam other users and especially our friends and relatives who seeing a message from us could trust. For this reason, before believing what we read online, even if it seems to have been sent by a friend or colleague we trust, we always make a call to the person concerned to ask if it was really him to send that message.