Facebook

[Edwin]

If any of you are connected with me/us on facebook on this forum, and I know of a couple anyway, I want to briefly explain what has happened to me/us. I went to see the doctor in Wenatchee to learn the results of my prostate biopsy. While in the warehouse grocery and merchadise store we called home to ask Carol if there was anything there that she wanted us to get. She told us, daughter and granddaughter, that we had been hacked, someone set up a duplicate account pretending to be me/us, and was giving friends requests of people who were already our friends. They were setting up an account in our names to try to scam people out of money, pretending to be us. One thing that I heard was that I was supposed to be telling people I had won $150,000, and I was wondering if they won money too? When I got home from Wenatchee I changed our facebook password, and I thought that would take care of the problem. Then about midnight I got into a chat with a friend who attends church with us, and she told me that she had been hit with the people pretending to be us at 10 p.m., so the password change didn't take care of the problem. I was getting ready to dump facebook, and I saw an option to secure our facebook account. I changed passwords for facebook 2 more times, and changed our email password. That was last night late. Then this morning I got a message from Carol's nephew telling me that someone had created a duplicate facebook account in our names, which we already knew, and he wrote like the problem was still happening. Where so many other people were being affected by someone pretending to be us, I decided to permanently delete our facebook account. So, now it is deactivated from the site, and will be permanently deleted in two weeks or January 20, 2013. We are going to have people watch for us to see that this activity is not continuing. We will not get involved with facebook for a while, long enough so that all this will certainly disappear, and then we may change as much of our identifications as we can, and then come back, but that may be several months before we get back on facebook. I am truly sorry for anyone who has had any trouble because of this, and I am sorry that we are going to lose contact with many of our family, friends, and relatives, but with continued reports of this activity I decided that the problems were drastic enough to warrant deleting our account.

[red]

I feel the same way with you sir Ed. We just had our laptop reformat after christmas because I got 30 viruses on it because of facebook. I was told by the technician on careful clicking links. Plus I got email from myself on yahoo account???? Why would I send email to myself? Strange. Then my husband's yahoo email account was stolen because he cant open it anymore. Then we asked yahoo by phone it turned out it is a company that can get in to your system and said they can fix your laptop from remote place! Then started working on it like cursor moving , I was like wow...then started asking money...so I grab the laptop turn it off took the battery out then took it to the computer shop. I advise never use yahoo anymore for personal emails specially sending your bank transactions to it. I use gmail since years ago. My yahoo is just for junk and rarely open it. Sad part is my husband's tax documents is in yahoo account. We were able to discover that his account was stolen because I was asking about tax. Yahoo sucks you cant even call them. so no yahoo ever.

[Edwin]

That's weird, Red, you getting emails from yourself! We didn't have any idea this was happening until our granddaughter called Carol from the kids' house 600 feet from ours, and told her we had been hacked, and told her what was happening. They got rid of us off their facebook site immediately, and we have been getting numerous reports from many people that they saw the same thing. I'm sure many people wondered why we were sending more friends requests when we were already their friends! We were not sending them. Someone told us later that some hacker set up an identical facebook account, just like ours, and I guess you can't tell the difference, although I never did see it, but just got all the reports. Then the hacker was using the facebook that looked like ours to try to scam money from people. The lady from our church who chatted with me about it told me that it was a foreign person who did this, because she said they used very poor English. I am hoping that if anyone sees our names connected with facebook they will let us know because I deleted, and our facebook account is deactivated from the site, and it will be completely deleted January 14th. Some of those people use viruses to harvest your passwords, and that is how they get so much of our information. I checked my online banking as soon as this happened, and we are still safe there. I have a very good antivirus protection so we should be safe there as well. I just reformatted this harddrive just a few days ago, and this computer is very clean. It was just after that, that our facebook account was hacked, which is strange. I think the hackers were friending people who were our friends, so that they would have a false facebook account with our name on it, and they were using it to try to scam money out of people, but other than that I don't know what else they were trying to do. I think our names and our email address has disappeared from facebook, so I think that false facebook account has been taken down as well, at least I hope that has happened, and I am depending on people letting me know if they see any thing of it still left.

Yes, I have had my computer manipulated in the good sense by computer techs remotely moving my cursor around, but I have never had to pay for it. It has always been from supported software, so the work was free, and it is astounding that they can take over your computer and do that. I resolve any of my computer problems by saving all my information and reformatting the harddrive. It takes a lot of time, but it is easy for me and it works great!

[Edwin]

I was actively involved in facebook for a very short time, and then after that I got too busy to be that involved, but I still read it a lot of the time although I stopped writing anything on facebook because I was just too busy. Carol did a quite a bit of reading and writing on facebook, and I am sorry for her sake that we are no longer on facebook. It was nice to hear from our family and friends, and hear about what they were all doing, but now we are kind of in the dark, and they are all still connected with facebook, so they all know what is happening, but we don't. Oh, well, it is okay. Maybe after enough time elapses we can get back on. I still don't know who hacked us, or why, except they wanted to use our name on our facebook account, or rather the fake duplicate account they made to look like ours, to scam other people out of their money.

[mystic]

David, just a couple of suggestions.

The fake account was not your account. They duplicated your account. This means they made an account with the same name of yours, pretending to be you, and started to send friendship requests from the fake account. People, because of human error, would befriend them, and then they would be able to contact them, etc.

So, changing your password might have no effect. Your contacts are public, so anybody can see. They might just have duplicated your account and contacted the friends that are publicily visible in your account, without necessarily having hacked your account.

Or... second possibility, you might have installed unadvertitely a keylogger virus on your computer which sent your facebook password to them, and they are using it. In this case, changing the password will be of no help. They will have all passwords of your bank account, and any site you connect to. In this case, the only solution is to reformat your hard drive. But I sincerely doubt that this is the problem. You can reformat your disk for extra security, but I think they are just spoofing your fb account without any real clue of your password. I don't think they send messages from your account (if this were the case, they would not need to set up a duplicate account). They just use the fake account.

In my idea, it could just be one of those new fb worms. They did not target you specifically, but probably it is a much wider issue that fb is having.

[Edwin]

Thank you for the input on this, mystic. What I don't know at this point is if that fake account is still going, or if it disappeared when I deleted and facebook deactivated our account. I hope it went down when I did that. I wrote an alert on our wall about what had happened, and I don't know if that stayed anywhere or if that disappeared when I took our account down. The other thing is that people must have thought that something happened to our account, and we sent them another friend request, which as it turned out we didn't send, but they got one, and they thought, "what happened to them, sure we want to be their friends, so without questioning, and out of kindness they accepted the friend request again, and then they became part of that fake account with them being listed as friends there. Well, I hope that is gone, because the attempt was being made to scam people with talk about winning money.

You are right about the changing of the password having no effect, because the lady from our church who chatted with me, told me that it was happening to her from our account after I changed the password. Then I did what facebook suggested to secure the account with an alert sent to them, so they verified who I was, and I changed not only facebook password, but email password as well. Then we got a message that was from Carol's nephew about what had happened, and he was stired up about it, and less than friendly in his comments. So, that upset Carol, so she told me to get rid of it, so we would have no more troubles this way, so that is why I deleted the account, with deactivation until it is permanently deleted on January 20th. We are not sure whether Carol's nephew's comments were about what had happened the day or two before, or whether it was still happening, but it doesn't matter now, as it is gone, our account anyway, and I hope the fake account is gone as well.

I just reformatted the harddrive just days before this happened, so it would be really easy to do that again as we have saved everything on this computer. I was worried about other information on our computer and relative to the internet. I haven't seen any evidence that they have done any other kind of damage. I have been checking my online banking regularly, and nothing bad has been happening there. So, as far as the way we have been effected, we have not had anything happen bad to our computer, our internet, or anything connected with us, only that someone using the fake account has been contacting people to attempt to scam money from them. I hope everyone would contact us before they would fall prey to something like that! We are okay, except for missing facebook, but I just hope that no one else is having any problems becasue of what has happened to us.

[mystic]

The fake account will be still going, because it's not connected to your account in any way. It has no influence that you closed your account.

I suggest you report the fake account to Facebook and you don't need to close yours.

[Edwin]

Thanks, mystic, I will try to find a way to report it to facebook. Then do you think I can get our facebook going again without having more problems? I will google and see how I can report that. Thanks!

[Edwin]

mystic, I had trouble finding where to report it, so I wrote some feedback, sent it to facebook, and maybe they will help take care of the problem. I took your advice, and I reactivated it because what you said makes sense! Thanks, Mystic!

[mystic]

You can follow this link:

http://www.facebook.com/help/167722253287296/

Fb does not allow accounts that "Pretend to be you or someone else".