Quick Tip to Prevent “Facebook Cloning” – read and take action immediately, it takes 2 minutes to protect your FB account! If you have never done this before, do it NOW!
Today I reported 8 (!) accounts to Facebook for cloning friends’ FB accounts. Cloning is different from hacking and it is having a major uptick right now for some reason. Sooooo frustrating!!
Luckily, having an annoying spammer clone your account isn’t as bad for you as having someone hack your FB account, but it can be bad for your friends.
So when a spammer “clones” your account, they create a brand new FB account with your name, profile photo, cover photo and they often go in and populate the account with photos and stuff they have swiped from your real FB account. Even if your account is private, they can still access any public photos like profile photos and cover photos.
Then the use your new “cloned” (FAKE!) account to send friend requests to all the people on your real Facebook account’s friend list. People assume the request was sent by you and many of them will accept the request from the new account and now they are “friends” with the spammer’s “cloned” account.
ANY Facebook account is at risk of being cloned, but there is one simple thing you can do that may make your account less attractive to a spammer:
HIDE YOUR FRIENDS LIST FROM THE PUBLIC!
Change the privacy of your friend list to Only Me.
By changing the privacy of your friend list to Only Me, the spammer doesn’t know who to send spam friend requests to with the new account, they have no reason to clone you if they can’t get to your friends.
Go to your Privacy settings on Facebook and change your Friends to “Only Me”. Do this today and have your friends and family do it too! Don’t make it easy for the spammers and give them the opportunity to clone you!
ON YOUR COMPUTER:
1. Click your picture in the upper right corner of Facebook account
2. Choose Setting and Privacy from dropdown menu
3. Choose Settings
4. Choose Privacy on left sidebar
5. 3rd section down is “How people find and contact you”
6. Change Who Can See Your Friend List to ONLY ME by clicking on edit