Email scam Re: Facebook Accounts

CallMeKate

CallMeKate

Well-known Member
Location
Mid-Atlantic US
I just got an email saying my Facebook account has had a large number of logins from a place in India. Even named the town there. There's a button to press if it wasn't you logging in. Of course I wouldn't have pressed it anyhow, but I can see how it would frighten people. It didn't even come to the email box that my FB is connected to. :rolleyes:

But anyhow, a heads up about it. They even used the FB logo, etc. Not sure what happens if someone presses it, but I suspect hacking of some kind is involved.
 
CallMeKate said:
I just got an email saying my Facebook account has had a large number of logins from a place in India. Even named the town there. There's a button to press if it wasn't you logging in. Of course I wouldn't have pressed it anyhow, but I can see how it would frighten people. It didn't even come to the email box that my FB is connected to. :rolleyes:

But anyhow, a heads up about it. They even used the FB logo, etc. Not sure what happens if someone presses it, but I suspect hacking of some kind is involved.
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I am experiencing intermittent problems trying to get to Facebook.

Account Temporarily Unavailable.
Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minute
 
OldFeller said:
I am experiencing intermittent problems trying to get to Facebook.
Account Temporarily Unavailable.
Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minute
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Has it let you back in yet? Mine's okay at this time but I didn't have the same problem. I do know that Amazon was acting strangely this morning and there were a bunch of "down" reports on it, but it resolved.
 
OldFeller said:
It's acting slowly. The internet reports problems. It's not a good day for Facebook. Worldwide according to the internet.
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Wonder why mine's okay. :unsure: I guess because I just peek in couple of times a day to check on local stuff and family posts and don't really use it heavily. I probably wouldn't notice slowness.
 
Facebook to me is a minefield of conflicting needs and wants. You want to contact your friends and yet every key stroke you make is a conflict with those who watch you and want only to exploit you. Change your password they say. Yet the bogus still keeps coming in. Who is real, who is not. There is no pleasure in it. Just stress.
 
One of the main scams on facebook is a scammer cloning someone’s facebook account. All they have to do is take a screenshot of your facebook avatar and background picture, and make a new account using your name. Of course, it is not going to have all of the posts you have made over the years, so they have to write some posts to make it not look fake.

Next, they message your friends list and ask them to friend them, and many people will do that, not realizing it is not actually the person who is their friend.
Once they do that, they message your friends list again and tell them about a wonderful way that they/you just got a lot of money by applying for some grant, and start telling the friend where to send their financial information to get their own free grant. This is where the scam starts, of course.

There is not really anyway that you can stop people from cloning your account; however, you CAN make them not want to do it. They target people who have a lot of friends, so if you only have 50 friends, you are less of a target than if you have 1,000 friends.
However, if you make your friend list private, then , no matter how many friends you have, they can’t see any of them, so it does them no good to clone your account.
Changing passwords doesn’t make any difference, since they didn’t actually hack your account, they just made an identical one that looks like yours.
 
Happyflowerlady said:
One of the main scams on facebook is a scammer cloning someone’s facebook account. All they have to do is take a screenshot of your facebook avatar and background picture, and make a new account using your name. Of course, it is not going to have all of the posts you have made over the years, so they have to write some posts to make it not look fake.

Next, they message your friends list and ask them to friend them, and many people will do that, not realizing it is not actually the person who is their friend.
Once they do that, they message your friends list again and tell them about a wonderful way that they/you just got a lot of money by applying for some grant, and start telling the friend where to send their financial information to get their own free grant. This is where the scam starts, of course.

There is not really anyway that you can stop people from cloning your account; however, you CAN make them not want to do it. They target people who have a lot of friends, so if you only have 50 friends, you are less of a target than if you have 1,000 friends.
However, if you make your friend list private, then , no matter how many friends you have, they can’t see any of them, so it does them no good to clone your account.
Changing passwords doesn’t make any difference, since they didn’t actually hack your account, they just made an identical one that looks like yours.
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I received a friend request from someone yesterday and it sounds like the beginning of this scam. It was supposedly from someone that I have been friends with for years. I did not accept it. If I am already friends with someone that is supposedly sending me a friend request, I never accept them and always delete it. This makes be glad I have my page private because if I'm not friends with them, they can't access my page.
 
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My phone uses the Chrome browser but on PC I use Duck,Duck, Go. Tried to log into FB on PC and couldn't.
Turns out I had to open it from Chrome or 2 other browsers of their choice.
Just some added info for you if you use other Browsers and having problems signing in. That was my experience anyway.
 
Happyflowerlady said:
One of the main scams on facebook is a scammer cloning someone’s facebook account. All they have to do is take a screenshot of your facebook avatar and background picture, and make a new account using your name. Of course, it is not going to have all of the posts you have made over the years, so they have to write some posts to make it not look fake.

Next, they message your friends list and ask them to friend them, and many people will do that, not realizing it is not actually the person who is their friend.
Once they do that, they message your friends list again and tell them about a wonderful way that they/you just got a lot of money by applying for some grant, and start telling the friend where to send their financial information to get their own free grant. This is where the scam starts, of course.

There is not really anyway that you can stop people from cloning your account; however, you CAN make them not want to do it. They target people who have a lot of friends, so if you only have 50 friends, you are less of a target than if you have 1,000 friends.
However, if you make your friend list private, then , no matter how many friends you have, they can’t see any of them, so it does them no good to clone your account.
Changing passwords doesn’t make any difference, since they didn’t actually hack your account, they just made an identical one that looks like yours.
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IrishEyes said:
My phone uses the Chrome browser but on PC I use Duck,Duck, Go. Tried to log into FB on PC and couldn't.
Turns out I had to open it from Chrome or 2 other browsers of their choice.
Just some added info for you if you use other Browsers and having problems signing in. That was my experience anyway.
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I have a similar setup but instead of Chrome, I use MS Edge. But yesterday, when I was unable to get into FB on DDG, I went to Edge and it went into the account. So when that happened, I went back to DDG and that worked too. A few minutes later, neither browser could get into my FB account and it was like that for some time. So I don't think it was browser related.

Sites on the internet said that FB was down in general and only when @CallMeKate got in did it work again. So I'm giving her all the credit for fixing it.
 
OldFeller said:
Sites on the internet said that FB was down in general and only when @CallMeKate got in did it work again. So I'm giving her all the credit for fixing it.
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Aw shucks, thank you for noticing that... I will be expecting a massive check from Zuckerberg any day now. :ROFLMAO: Seriously though, I did wonder why sites were like that yesterday...so I researched it, and this explains some of it... at least my Amazon problem. @OldFeller
"Yes, as of March 2026, drone strikes in the UAE and Bahrain hit Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers, causing significant internet disruptions and outages for cloud services. These attacks, linked to regional conflict, caused physical damage and fires, impacting numerous digital services, including banking and delivery platforms."
 
CallMeKate said:
Aw shucks, thank you for noticing that... I will be expecting a massive check from Zuckerberg any day now. :ROFLMAO: Seriously though, I did wonder why sites were like that yesterday...so I researched it, and this explains some of it... at least my Amazon problem. @OldFeller
"Yes, as of March 2026, drone strikes in the UAE and Bahrain hit Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers, causing significant internet disruptions and outages for cloud services. These attacks, linked to regional conflict, caused physical damage and fires, impacting numerous digital services, including banking and delivery platforms."
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That was the first thing I thought of yesterday.
But is it true or is just IT finding a plausible excuse (based upon recent international events) that relinquishes their role in all of this? :unsure:
 
OldFeller said:
But is it true or is just IT finding a plausible excuse (based upon recent international events) that relinquishes their role in all of this? :unsure:
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That's one of those questions that is probably worth $64,000... but as with everything else these days, the answer depends on who's answering the question. Nothing seems definitive these days.
 
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