Photo of some weird dimlit hacker room
Photo by Kaur Kristjan
I was going to make a clickbait title, but since I've joined the hive network I've been actively telling people that it's a social network for adults. You may have a difference experience, but Hive rewards thought out posts and comments, other social sites reward trolling and pushing out as much garbage as possible.
Anyway, an imposter account is when someone finds your profile, they download your profile picture and starts a new account with your first and last name. They then go through your friends list and friend requests them. Your friends re-add you because they think you have another account, which is common because people get thrown in facebook jail all the time for saying the truth breaking terms of service.
Is this an effective scam?
The last time they did this, they were able to friend 8 of my friends within an hour, some I hadn't talked to in 5 years. They then found the same friends on telegram and immediately messaged one of them. Luckily my friend was tech savvy and knew it was odd.
This happened to my friends, my family, myself. It's embarrasing because you usually find out from your friend sending you a message asking if it's you. This generally happens more to people that post on public high traffic pages, such as the cdc, or the white house page.
From my limited knowledge of technology, I know basic coding and have used various web tools, I can say that they're just using a tool that collects less private facebook profiles off these pages.
How to prevent it is easy enough. Don't worry, you can still troll people. All you have to do is make sure that only you can see your friends, or even mutual friends can see your friends list, but they might spider from another imposter account.
They don't have your account, they only see your profile pic, name and friends list before you fix it with this method. People do this so they can message your friends and scam them, usually to request emergency cash, or they can email them or even use their phone number if posted to text them pretending it's you. They can also take all your friend's pictures and upload them to lewd sites, use it to start fake dating profiles etc
What I suggest is first see if any of your friends have two accounts that you haven't confirmed as actually both your friend. It should be obvious. If you've been impersonated , it's easy to report it and they get shut down really fast, within seconds usually.
One of those clicks through to say they're an imposter of yourself or something to that effect. I didn't want to click more in the example picture or it would report my friend.
Anyway, I hope this helps someone. Feel free to comment for clarification if it was confusing somehow.