Facebook Pretenders

These days Facebook is an important social medium. I use it a lot. Kate says I use it too much.

For reasons which escape me I've had a number of occassions where someone pretends to be me -- they copy pictures from my profile, set up an account under my name, populate it with minimal data and then ask my friends to become their friends. They have not "hacked" me, they're just "pretending" to be me.

Many mistake the friend request as coming from me, after all the profile picture looks like me, and they accept the request without thinking further. Others, having been bitten by this before, don't accept the friend request and instead either ignore it or better, send me a message asking "have you been hacked?".  There's more you can do to help me and protect others.

What I do when notified that someone is pretending to be me is to start by looking up their profile on Facebook. To do that:

1. From the Facebook search bar I enter "Reg Quinton". You'll get a list of people, posts, mentions and much more.
2. Of all the results back I select for "People" rather than posts, videos, etc.
3. If there is one or more of me I check each one. Any recent additions to Facebook using my picture are people pretending to be me.
4. Click on the person pretending to be me (by clicking the name or photo) to see their profile.
5. Verify that profile is recent, the history is abbreviated and it doesn't include my postings over the years.
6. On their profile banner to the left side you'll find "Add Friend", "Message" and a "..." pull down menu.
7. From the "..." pull down menu select "Report Profile" and go through the effort to report them as pretending to be someone you know. Namely me!

Facebook will quickly act on a report, especially if they get several reports. A report from me, and reports from you who the pretender is scamming.

What you can do when you receive a friend request from someone pretending to be me is to click on their image or name in the friend request to get to their profile and follow steps 5-7. You should also send me a message letting me know that you've done so. If you're already a friend of mine you will not receive a second friend request from me.

Should you get a friend request from anyone you really ought to investigate a bit before accepting the request. There are a lot of scammers out there. Click on their image or name, investigate their profile and make an informed decision. I will sometimes e-mail or phone people to confirm that it really was them who made the request. You should do the same at least some of the time.

If you accept a friend request you are exposing profile information that is restricted to friends only, you're exposing postings that were private to your friends and, this is important, you are exposing your list of friends!

I have recently editted my security settings to make sure my friends list is not exposed to the public. You ought to do the same. See this Profile Tip from Facebook on how to keep your "Friends" list private.