A few days ago, I received an early morning whatsapp message from a friend. He's checking to see if I had actually sent him a Facebook Messenger request to connect. I quickly replied that it was not me and thanked him for letting me know.
I then went to my Facebook account to put up a status informing friends that my account has possibly been cloned and for them not to respond to any message from this fake account. A few minutes after that status update, some friends replied that indeed, they had received message request from someone suspicious. I then did a Facebook search on my own profile and true enough, there was another account using my name and photo but without any personal details. It was created about 12 hours earlier.
I made a report to Facebook about this fake account and my report was acknowledged by them via email. The next day, I did a similar search and found out that the fake profile is no longer there.
What do such impostors do with these clone accounts? From the feedback that I got from friends who had been similarly cloned, one trick that these impostors use is to send messages to other friends on our list with request or appeal for financial aid. Some trusting friends would mistakenly think that we are actually in need of such help and therefore would send the money.
Anyway, it was a good thing I managed to act quickly. I again sent a whatsapp message to the friend who gave me the heads-up. It's good to know that I have friends who check up on me once in a while.
Whatsapp and Facebook. Two social media platforms that I depend too much on.
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| Screen capture of the impostor's attempt to connect with a friend |
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