Facebook’s “Our Systems have Detected You Have Multiple Accounts” warning

It seems many thousands of Facebook users have been bombarded with a pop-up message from Facebook that claims Facebook’s “systems” have detected that the user has multiple Facebook accounts. The message also urges the Facebook user to remove the account.

The messages are worrying many Facebook users, and rightly so, since it appears that the Facebook warning may be misfiring, since many users who emailed us assert that they only use the one Facebook account.


The warning that appears when Facebook users log in.

Image text –
Warning: Our Systems have Detected You Have Multiple Accounts
“It looks like you have more than one account on Facebook. Facebook is a community where people use their real identities so you always know who you’re connecting with. Maintaining multiple accounts is a violation of our Terms and could result in all of your accounts being disabled. Please remove this account and help us keep Facebook safe and enjoyable for everyone.”

Of course it will come to no surprise to the majority that you can only use Facebook with your real identity, meaning it is a violation to use multiple accounts for one person. Needless to say this condition has been ignored by many users.

Fellow scam-busting site Facecrooks asked Facebook for an explanation, and this was their reply –

“We are currently testing a system that warns users who have opened multiple accounts, we are not taking any action on these users for the time being so there’s no need for anyone to worry. We are iterating on this system to be more accurate and are only notifying possible violators.”

So the warning is a legitimate Facebook warning – i.e. it’s no scam – but according to Facebook’s reply no action will be taken regarding those Facebook deem to have multiple accounts – not yet anyway. This does lead to the question of how Facebook will detect those using multiple accounts. This is information that they’ll never disclose but one would assume that Facebooks systems will take into consideration that many Facebook users will share computers.

As for now, your account(s) is/are safe. But remember multiple accounts are against Facebook’s T+Cs so in the future you may just find yourself losing those additional accounts, or all of them!

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Published by
Craig Haley