Facebook hackers are just a few of many the criminals that are out there in cyberspace. This writer never really obsessed about them much…until they scammed me.
Yes, I fell for the scam, which began as a message from a friend of mine, whom I rarely ever talked to, either on Facebook, or in person. That is one way they get to you, and they are very good at what they do.
In my case my hacker is from Nigeria, and he or she has 10 friends, all of whom hacked into my Facebook account, effectively logging me out of it.
They started posting ads selling a car and a trailer, and that’s when I started receiving text messages from friends asking if I had been hacked. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, I was hacked. As of this writing, I am still cut off from my account, which I have had for 17 years.
It is difficult to pinpoint an exact number of people who get hacked every day, but there has been a high frequency of cyberattacks.
Studies have suggested that an attack occurs every 39 seconds, and an estimated 300,000 Facebook accounts are hacked every day. This is a small percentage of Facebooks estimated three billion users, but it is still a significant amount.
Facebook accounts are treasure troves of personal information, and include your name, email address, phone number, date of birth, and even your location. Hackers target Facebook to collect this information, which they use for identity theft of sell on the dark web.
I personally spent literally all day on Sunday responding to texts from friends and colleagues, asking if my Facebook was hacked; they even tried the scam on a local lawyer here in Woodville. One of my friends gave them the number to the FBI; another gave them the number to the Tyler County Sheriff’s Office, and they did not like those responses.
Capt. Jathan Borel with the Woodville Police Department offered up the following comments, in summary: “We get a lot of scams reported to us, a popular one right now is the unpaid toll scam. We are seeing an increase in scams now because its tax season….unfortunately, we can’t prosecute any pf these crimes because they largely originate form other countries. Locally, we have had some instances where elderly individuals have fallen for scammers, and they wound up losing their entire life savings….it’s heartbreaking. We have worked with local banks to stop some of these wire transfers. A lot of the victims are elderly, trusting, and easily manipulated; very often they lose a lot of money.”
As I am writing this, I ran across another possible scam on a Facebook group. This one is obviously a scam: “Hey y’all!!! I have a Kroger gift card worth 90.90 selling for $70!!! It’s an ecard that I will email you and then you cash app me…anyone ???”
I hope no one actually falls for this, just the way they posted it is a huge red flag.
As for me personally, I was able to finally contact Facebook after jumping through way too many hoops, and report that I was hacked and locked out of my account. I did this on Thursday. As of today, I still don’t know if and when I will ever get my account back.
They even somehow managed to hack into one of my bank cards, and after receiving numerous texts from said institution wanting to know if it was me, I finally cancelled the card, and immediately after I did that, they fraudulent alerts stopped.
If you have read this far, I implore you, go to your Facebook account and update your privacy settings. The first thing I would do is remove my phone number, if you have it listed. I removed mine about four years ago. Pare your personal info down to the bare bones, set your friends list to “only me.”
Better yet, consider “unplugging” from social media for a while. You might be surprised how much you can accomplish not glued to a screen, engaged in doom-scrolling.
