How to hand control of your Facebook account over to crooks
If you have a burning desire to lose access to your Facebook account, and instead give full control of it to cyber crooks, then here’s how to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The same fundamental advice can be applied to a plethora of other online accounts, such as WhatsApp, Twitter, eBay or PayPal.
Here goes.
Reuse your easy-to-guess, in-the-dictionary password EVERYWHERE
Your password must be two things. Firstly, an easy-to-guess password that ideally will be in the dictionary. Secondly, it must be the same password for all your other online accounts.
An easy-to-guess password such as your date of birth followed by your surname means crooks have a better chance of guessing it, or successfully using a brute force attack to gain access.
And if you’re using the same password for all your other accounts, any data leak of usernames and passwords suffered by any company to which you have an account will consequently unlock the front door to all your other online accounts, including Facebook!
Click blindly on links in messages, texts and emails
…And then feel free to enter any sensitive information including your login details onto the resulting webpage.
Assume any email, message, text, phone call, carrier pigeon claiming to be from Facebook is actually from Facebook. Blindly trust whatever is in the message, and click on the links that come with it. And when that link leads you to a login page asking for your password, assume that it’s all safe and fine and enter your login details and submit them.
This is a really great way to hand over control of your Facebook account, because most messages claiming to come from Facebook asking you to click a link aren’t really from Facebook at all. They are scammers trying to lure you to spoof websites that steal the data you enter onto them.
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Accept all friend requests
Accept any friend request, regardless of whether it’s a stranger, or someone you recognise but were sure you are already friends with.
Strangers on Facebook can access all your data, and can post all sorts of dangerous or nefarious links for you to click on. Accepting requests from people you recognise can be a perfect way of falling for a cloning scam whereby crooks set up new profiles that look like they belong to a friend.
Install every “fun” app you see
Installing every app you see is a great way of ensuring lots of your personal information can be seen by third party developers, and if you’re lucky, these apps may even try and lure you off of Facebook and to malware-laden websites.
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Don’t enable 2FA
If you do manage to pass your login details to a crook, make sure that two factor authentication doesn’t stop them from logging into your account. 2FA makes it harder for crooks to login to your account by asking them for additional information that only you know.
Don’t install security software
There’s tons of great security software out there which can prevent malware like keyloggers from stealing your password. Make sure that none is installed on your device so you’ll never know and those keyloggers can operate unhindered.
Using the above advice, we’re confident that you can get your account stolen by cyber crooks in no time at all!
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