Superfact 19: An account impersonating you on Facebook does not mean you have been hacked. When someone using your name and photo starts sending friend requests to your friends on Facebook, they are most likely just copying your information. You have not been hacked.
I am considering this a super-fact because almost every time I see this the person being impersonated states “….I have been hacked”. Most likely they have not been hacked. They don’t need to change their password or take special precautions related to their account or password. It is not the problem.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network with over 3 billion users and few people understand this common Facebook problem, which is why I am calling it super-fact. All that happened is that someone downloaded their photo, copied some information, and started sending out friend requests to their friends. It is so easy to do that. Any 10-year-old can do it and there’s no hacking required. If you think about it for a minute, I am sure you all could do it.
However, it is not appropriate behavior and Facebook can delete your account and ban you if you resort to this behavior.
So, what can you do to reduce the chance of being impersonated? You can go to Settings & Privacy > Privacy Settings and set your profile to private by setting “Who can see your posts?” to friends only, but if you want visibility and don’t want to go that far you can set the “Who can see your friends list?” to “only me”. You can also set “Who can see posts you’re tagged in?” to “Friends” or “Only me”. You can “Limit Who can see your profile picture and cover photo?” to “Friends.”
Additional things you can do are regularly search your name on Facebook to check for fake profiles and avoid oversharing.
The actions above will greatly reduce the chance that someone will impersonate you but if it happens anyway, you can report the offender by going to the fake profile and click on the three dots (…) on their cover photo, select “Find support” or “report profile” and choose “Pretending to Be Someone” and follow the instructions to report the account. Encourage your friends to do the same.
To see the other Super Facts click here
Have you ever been impersonated on Facebook?
Newstrade
Interesting!! I’m thankful I don’t have Facebook 😆 obviously, we all know my content has been ripped off before, which is another story. Ugh, the internet. Is weird. And not always in a good way lol 😂
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Yes I certainly remember that. What many people don’t realize is that no hacking is required. Whether it is impersonating an account or stealing content all you need to know is how to copy. There are ways to protect yourself though, even though those ways are imperfect. Reporting the offender is the most important step, well after finding out that the offense happened. I am so sorry about what happened to you. Having creative works being stolen is a little bit worse than copying accounts or stealing photos.
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yes, it’s all too easy!
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Yes you are right. The only thing you need to know to impersonate an account is how to copy.
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Really helpful information, Thomas
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Thank you so much Jacqui
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Romance scammers steal photos and information and then try to hook up with people and get money out of them.
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That is a really bad one. I am taking lessons in French and one of the lessons was on that topic. We were listening to a French speaking lady from Belgium (they speak French or Flemish or German). She had lost more than 100,000 euros (roughly dollars) to two romance scammers at two different occasions (around 200,000 in total). Her daughter had died in a terrorist attack and she was really depressed and vulnerable, and they took advantage of her emotional state.
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Lulu: “Our Dada says if he accepted friend requests from all the fake accounts pretending to be people he was already friends with, he would have … um … well, at least twenty more ‘friends’ by now, anyway.”
Java Bean: “And that doesn’t include the friend requests from people he doesn’t even know!”
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Ha ha I can believe that, and I might have had hundreds
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Good to know, Thomas. I’m rarely on FB, because it got totally out of control. If I reign it in, I might use it more. Thanks for explaining the difference between getting hacked and being impersonated.
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Thank you so much Diane. I agree, Facebook has gotten worse. I am still there but I quit Twitter/X.
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I just signed up with Blue Sky and it seems to have a lot of people who want a kinder platform. I’ll see how it goes. 🙂
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That is interesting. I’ve seen other people do that too. I am curious how it will turn out.
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I quit Twitter when Musk took over, and I’m really happy to have a place to share posts now… like yours. 🙂
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I quit twitter after I found out about how badly Elon Musk had treated his employees.
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Thanks for this superfact post Thomas. No doubts this happens a lot on Fakebook, but there are hackers too. The digital robots are a menace there too. I miss the pre digital days. 🙂
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You are right. It is not the only issue. I picked it as a super-fact though because people duplicating profiles is so commonly misunderstood as hacking. But real hacking, as well as toxic comments and posts, and Facebooks own artificial no-intelligence algorithms, are perhaps even bigger problems.
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So true!
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