I get a small but constant trickle of fake Facebook accounts attempting to ‘friend’ me. What they all have in common is:
• They are using a name that is already the name of a real person who is already my ‘friend’ on FB
• They have stolen the avatar of the real person
• But they’ve superimposed a heart or a bunch of small hearts onto that avatar image.
It’s the lattermost factor that hits me as damned peculiar. The other two could easily be disconnected / disparate scammers trying to crawl into a lot of people’s network of friends. Fake someone’s profile name, steal their picture, then hit up all of that person’s existing friends with new friend requests, figuring some of them will forget they’ve already ‘friended’ that person, and then you can get THAT person’s friends, and so on.
But WTF, why would they all do this thing with the hearts? That makes them look a lot less disconnected and more like they’re linked in some kind of endeavor. I mean, it’s as if the people pretending to be calling from Microsoft to tell you you’ve got viruses on you computer all introduced themselves as “Jerry Fitzgibbons”. Or the Nigerians desperately wanting to deposit their life savings into your savings account all claimed to be standing on the sidewalk next to Bode Thomas Street in Lagos. You see what I’m saying?
Anyone else get these phony requests with stolen avatars bearing hearts?
My work requires us to view these short internet safety videos.
A recent one had an incident where a scamer had cloned a person’s account, then asked for loans from several of the original person’s friends. And they fell for it.
I used to be the Privacy Officer and the Business Info Sec Officer for the domestic businesses of a large financial services firm (I’m now a contented retiree ).
However stupid you think people might be in the extreme, multiply it by a bazillion.
I didn’t realize there was a Facebook algorithm for identifying clone accounts, nor would it have occurred to me that a scammer would steal the exact same image used by the original authentic account as the avatar. I mean, if I were a scammer — especially if I knew such software was in operation at FB — I’d go into the account, into photos, and steal one of the other photos and use that as the avatar.
The “hearts” thing is so uqiquitous that whenever I get a new FB request, if there are hearts on the avatar the first thing I do is check by name and nearly always, yes, there’s another profile with that same name, same image sans the hearts, and more often than not I’m already ‘friends’ with that profile.
(I usually do that before accepting other such requests but after going to their profile to get a sense of who they are and who else is their friend and to otherwise get a sense of what we have in common. The “is it a clone” thing is more of an afterthought, whereas with the hearts its more like “I know what this is…”)
They steal existing profile picutres because they want people to think it’s the real account of someone you know. I see fake accounts all the time and they always use the existing profile pictures and I’ve never seen hearts.
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