What To Do When Someone Clones Your Facebook Account
A month does not go by where I don’t see someone post on Facebook
“I’ve been hacked. Don’t accept any friend requests from me.”
This post explains what you should do about it using a recent occurrence with a relative.
Notify your friends and prompt reporting the fake account
If your friends tell you they received a friend request (from you), the first thing you should do is post on your page
“There is a clone of my account. Don’t accept any new friend requests from me!”
Encourage multiple friends to report the cloned account and to not accept the friend request.
1. On the friend request screen, click the “3 dots” and choose “Report [Friend Name]”
2. Select the reason as “Pretending to be someone” option, then input your friend’s name they are impersonating
3. Facebook will provide confirmation and follow up with your friend
You were probably not actually “hacked”
A common misconception is that someone hacked your account, or somehow gained access to it. This is most often not the case. An individual or computer program merely downloaded photos and information from your real profile, created a fake one (a clone), and then sent friend requests to people you were connected to.
To confirm, you can click on your profile icon in Facebook and:
1. visit “Settings”, then “Settings and privacy”
2. Choose “Security and login”
3. Review your recent logins and verify they were all recognized devices and locations.
If they are all recognizable, nothing to worry about. I highlighted a couple settings that are strongly recommended, however, and that includes 2-factor authentication (preferably with an Authentictor app and not just SMS), and alerts for unrecognized logins.
What if my account was hacked?
Follow these instructions if you think your Facebook account was truly hacked.
Why would anyone want to clone me?
Although this is speculation, my best guess is that if some individual or group (bad actor) had enough accounts that had legitimate friends then when they post fake or malicious content and links it would have a chance to appear on people’s timelines. The more people connected to an account, the more reputable it may seem, so the automated systems have less chance to detect the real posts from the fake ones.
Hopefully these tips make these cloned accounts a little less scary and the more people know how to handle them (report them), the less impact they have.
Happy surfing!
