Facebook Account Cloned – What Is It And How To Fight It?

For starters, don’t panic because a cloned Facebook account is easy to figure out. A cloned account is a copy where a person uses your photo, date of birth, interests, and other publicly available information that you specified on the current page. By creating cloned pages, scammers want to trick your friends into money or other valuable data. Modern adolescents can quickly identify clones, but what to do for the older ones, because cloning can cause severe damage: fraudsters can steal passwords from bank cards or other social networks.

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Don’t confuse account cloning with hacking – it’s just the result of theft of public data to trick your family and friends. Fraudsters can add your real friends as friends and ask them for money to solve unforeseen problems – for example, you seem to have been robbed on a bus and urgently need money to get home. At first glance, it may seem to you – who believes in this in the 21st century? But some Facebook users will fall into this trap.

For this reason, you need to learn how to identify cloned accounts. Moreover, scammers do not stop at simple money-taking. They can:

1. Send harmful messages to gain access to the device.
2. Manipulate friends’ emotions and lure other essential data.
3. Use fake websites to let your friends shop there, and then scammers can get access to credit cards.
4. Undermine your reputation by posting obscene information.

How To Determine Whether Your Facebook Account Is Cloned?

To find out if your Facebook account has been cloned, you need to search by your name. However, you will likely find people with the same name as yours who use it legally. Therefore, if you are looking for clones, you should not immediately write to them that they are scammers – just read the information, look at the photo, and then you can understand whether it is a clone.

There is an easier way to learn about cloning a page – these are your friends. Before the scammer writes a message to your friend, he will add him as a friend. If your friend knows that you already have a page, they will most likely report suspicious activity to you. Even if your friends add the cloned page as friends, scammers can easily pass themselves off by sending spam messages of this type: follow the link and lend money. You can also ask your friends in advance to report fake messages from your clones.

What To Do If Your Facebook Account Has Been Cloned?

Facebook is very strict with cloned pages and tries to prevent this from happening. However, if you do find a cloned account, please contact Facebook support immediately. To fix the problem, you need to open a fake profile and follow the instruction below:

1. Go to to the cloned profile and click the More options (…) menu
2. Select Find support or report profile
   
3. Choose Pretending to Be Someone as the reason
   
4. Select either Me, A Friend, or Celebrity as the impersonated person
   
5. Click Submit to send the report
   

After you complain about the cloned account, post on your page a message like this: “There is a cloned account, do not accept it as a friend, do not reply to messages, and do not follow the links.” So you will be able to preserve your reputation and protect your friends from scammers.

How To Determine If An Account Is Hacked But Not Cloned?

If someone clones your account, the scammer is trying to impersonate you. However, if someone hacks into your account, then the scammer will truly own your page, even though you may not know about it. There are many clones on Facebook, but we recommend that you still make sure that no one else owns your profile besides you. To determine if someone has hacked your profile, follow these steps:

1. Open the Facebook web page and sign in to your account.
2. In the upper right corner, find the triangle icon and go toselect “Settings.”Settings & Privacy > Settings
3. In the left column, select the section “Security and Login.”Security and Login
   
4. Facebook will give you information about which devices are logged into the system, from which locations, and at what time. Click on See More the “Details” section, and you can see a complete list of logins to the page – if you find suspicious logins not from your device or location, change your password and username since your page has been hacked. If every input suits you, you shouldn’t change anything.

Step-by-step Instruction on How to Solve Your Facebook Account Hacking Problem

If you notice suspicious logins on the right, click the More options button beside the relevant entry, select Not You? and report it to Facebook support. You should also click Log Out in the same menu to end the unauthorized session. Then you can change the login password. We also recommend setting up two-factor authentication, which will allow you to provide better security.

To prevent any attempt to hack your account, turn on notifications about unrecognized logins. By enabling this feature, Facebook will notify you of all suspicious devices trying to log in. Thus, you can immediately determine if someone is trying to break into your account. To enable this feature, follow these steps:

1. Open the Facebook web page and sign in to your account.
2. In the upper right corner, find the triangle icon and select Settings & Privacy > Settings
3. Go to Security & Login
4. Click Get alerts about unrecognized logins
5. Choose how you want to receive notifications and save changes
   

How to Prevent Attempted Account Cloning?

To prevent any attempt to clone your account, first hide your friend’s list from outsiders. Scammers will use your friend list to defraud money and perform other manipulative actions. However, it will be more difficult for scammers to find your friends who fall into their traps if your list is hidden. To hide your friend’s list, follow these steps:

1. Open the Facebook web page and log in.
2. In the upper right corner, find the triangle icon and select Settings & Privacy > Settings
3. In the left column, select Privacy
4. In the How People Find and Contact You section, click Who can see your friends list?
5. Choose the relevant privacy setting.

Written by VeePN Research Lab VeePN Research Lab is dedicated to provide you latest posts about internet security and privacy.