The new Facebook hoax that you should know

A new Facebook hoax is circulating – and it is targeting your inbox.

"We have heard that some people are seeing articles on Facebook cloned accounts.This takes the form of a" chain "type opinion, said a Facebook official.

Here is what happens: you receive a message from an existing Facebook friend informing you that they have received a friend request from you. Then you are asked to view your account and forward the message to all your friends.

But users follow these actions without checking if their profile is duplicated and this creates a lot of confusion, said a Louisiana official.

The message reads as follows:

Hello …. I have actually received another friend request from you yesterday … that I have ignored so that you want to check your account. Hold your finger on the message until the Transmit button appears … then press Transfer and all the people you want to send back as well … I had to do them individually. Good luck!

So what does the message warn you about theoretically? Facebook cloning.

When this happens, someone steals photos and personal information from an existing user's profile and creates a second profile, the "cloning" and passing it for it. They then send friend requests to the person's current friends on Facebook in order to try to get more personal information about the person that they have cloned, or to find out. 39; send fraudulent messages, according to Webopedia.

These scams have occurred massively in the past, as in the summer of 2016.

Facebook officials confirmed that there had been no unusual increase in recently cloned accounts, and that this latest hoax had no connection with the data breach that occurred in September.

"We have not seen an increase in the number of new identity theft reports (cloned accounts)," said a Facebook official. "The volume of these types of publication is not a good measure of the frequency of identity theft, for example, it is not accurate that" almost all accounts are cloned ", as the" no " says one of these publications. "

The best thing for users to do is simply delete the messages they receive about it, especially if they echo the same language used above. If someone is really concerned about Facebook cloning, they should check the profile and report it to Facebook. People can also find tools to report fake accounts here.