Facebook to start alerting you when someone impersonates you
Facebook have turned their attention to the issue of cloning scams after announcing that they have released a tool that will notify a user if someone is trying to clone their Facebook account.
Facebook cloning has been quite the problem for the social network and its users for a number of years now. If you’re not familiar with the term, it is when someone creates a new Facebook account with your name and your profile picture (two pieces of information that are available to anyone) in order to trick people into believing the account belongs to you. We discuss this type of scam in more detail in our blog post here, which we recommend giving a read.
Facebook cloning scams mostly attempt to trick the friends associated with that cloned account into accepting a friend request where further scams can then take place. However these clone accounts are also linked to harassment and stalking.
Up until now, you’d have no idea that someone created an account with your name and profile picture. Targets of this scam generally only become aware when their friends inform them that an account is sending out friend requests in their name.
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But a new automatic detection system built into Facebook will try and warn you that someone has created a duplicate account using your name and profile picture and will send you a notification if it happens. From there you can tell Facebook if the account is legitimate or whether it’s trying to impersonate you.
Facebook have said that while the detection system is automatic, potentially offending accounts will be manually reviewed beforehand to see if any action needs to be taken.
It’s a potentially useful feature. Cloning scams are a popular scam on Facebook. Once a scammer creates an account with your name and profile picture, they can then start sending friend requests to all your friends (which is why we recommend making your friends list private) and from there they can target your friends with more scams, like pretending to be you in order to trick people into sending you money.
The feature is still being tested and has not been rolled out quite yet, but hopefully it will put an end to this long running con. We’ll have to wait and see. If you get a notification like this from Facebook let us know!
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