What are some easy things a person can do to vet the friend requests received on Facebook?

When you receive a “Friend” request, whether it comes from Facebook or from Facebook Messenger, the first thing you should do is to click through to view the person’s profile before you add them to your own. Just one look at some of these shadow profiles would certainly raise red flags, because the person requesting your “friendship” has very sparse information on the profile, often only a name and a picture. A typical “hack” like this involves a requester, who has set up a new profile in order to impersonate someone by using the personal details they already possess, namely, the profile of a real person to copy, and the name of a real-life friend of that real person to impersonate. In fact, you and the real person whose profile is being shadowed are likely already Facebook friends. The goal for this hacking and impersonation is to access more of the real person’s info and to accumulate more profile pictures, names, and friend lists, so they can turn around and impersonate more people.

How did someone get that profile picture and name?

Well, one might wonder that question. But there are many ways your profile picture and name get the attention of hackers. First of all, your name and picture are most likely available to anyone. How else is your 2nd-grade classmate going to find you on Facebook? Did you use your FB profile log-in to comment on a public blog at some point, or perhaps to comment on a letter to the editor from your online local newspaper, or maybe to review a cooking-tip post? Perhaps the scammer got the name because you liked something that wasn’t as legitimate as you thought when you clicked it through; there are a million ways people can get your name and profile picture from your public Facebook trail.

Remember, Facebook is a tool in which you can connect with friends near-and-far—in real-time—to see pictures and watch videos, but Facebook can also be a by-pass to your personal privacy and that of your friends. If and when you comment on or share posts from blogs of questionable sites, then along with the cute pic or video, you may have invited an unknown entity to reach behind some of your layers of privacy.

Actions once you find a “Shadow” Profile page

1. Check your own friend’s list (or member’s list, if this is a group) to be sure that you are not already friends with the person who has sent the questionable request.
2. Confirm any known details about the real person you know with the profile of the person you think might be a fake/shadow, such as checking whether the new profile uses the correct spellings for places or last names, or it includes the correct middle  or maiden names, birthplace, high schools, or other details.
3. Check the other tabs such as “Photos” and “Friends” and ask, “Which mutual friends do I share with the person on that profile?” (if necessary, contact your friends to see if they know about the profile) and ask, “Who are their other friends?” For example, if the new profile’s other friends are all from someplace like Indonesia, where you know that your actual friend is unlikely to know many people, then that is a clue that something might not be as it should be. Also, ask yourself, “Does this person have the friends that you would expect them to have?” based on the details that you already know about the real friend’s life, relatives, location, activities, and job.
4. Check how long that person has been on Facebook. A very recent profile without posts or details doesn’t jive with a friend request from someone that you know has been on Facebook for a much longer time and certainly should make you a bit suspicious.
5. Keep emotionally charged rhetoric out of the path of your judgment. For example, most of us would cringe at the idea that we would accept a friend request from someone because they were really good looking or were a celebrity (“Why is Brad Pitt asking to be my friend?”), but too often, other emotionally charged visuals get past our common sense and we let people past our Facebook door, because they are “politicians or preachers with a name we recognize” or because they are wearing a military or police uniform in their profile picture or are holding what looks like their poor orphan children in Africa or they present another sympathetic persona whom we would wish to support. Don’t let emotion get past your common sense; scammers also know that such images raise your sympathy and hope to use such things to get past your guard.

What if I find that I have been “Friended” by a hacked profile?

If you think that you have been contacted by a shadow profiler or anyone that legitimately raises your suspicions (legitimate suspicions that must be rationally explained to Facebook), you can report such profiles to Facebook. Simply, click the suspicious profiler’s name to bring up their profile page, go to the top menu bar on the far right side, next to the word “Message,” and then, where you see the three dots (…), click them to bring out a drop-down menu, where you will see the word, “Report”; click and then follow the prompts, as needed to describe your concern. Facebook will look into the issue reported, and probably will ask you the name of the person whose account you believe was hacked in the first place.

So that the real friends know they have been “hacked” by a shadow profiler, you can contact them yourself through a post on Facebook, through Facebook Messenger (IM), although FB will probably contact them. People usually want to know so they can warn their friends not to accept friend requests from a fake profile. You might want to post a warning on your own profile about it, to say, “I noticed that my friend, ‘So-and-so’ had a shadow profile set up in their name and here is what to do about it.” You might copy and paste a link to this blog entry so that the person knows more about what to do in the event that their profile was hacked by a shadow profiler. You can delete the shadow profile from off of your friends list, if you happened to already accept their “Friending,” once you have reported it to Facebook and have contacted your real friend.

If you are trying to figure out which profile was the shadow to delete and which was the real one to keep or to contact, you might check it through your own friend’s list, because after having recently clicked to “friend” the shadow, the fake shadow profile will probably be in your “Recently Added” Friends section, found at the “Top Menu Bar,” under the category of “Friends.” Probably, if you were friends with the real person’s profile for more than a couple of weeks and the fake friend’s profile for less than that, you will only have one of them–the fake–in your “Recently Added” section.

For more info on how to vet and verify the sources from which you choose to post, you might check out my blog post, “Verify Your Post on Social Media“ or google your questions, where you will find some interesting articles, such as this one on Journalists’ Resource,  “Tools for verifying and assessing the validity of social media and user-generated content” and there are many others such as “How to Report a hacked account” on the “Facebook Community Q & A pages.”

Strangers at the door

As a website content manager, blogger, and administrator for social media and Facebook groups, I am constantly having to evaluate whether to accept or delete the many individual requests from people around the world and the nation who want to join these groups or who want to friend me personally. Sometimes, these requests from strangers come in waves. For example, I might get ten requests this week from people who live in Nigeria; next week, maybe ten from somewhere in Central America, or ten the next week from men wearing a US military uniform. Who are these people? Strangers? I have no idea who they are!

FB is a great tool for what it does correctly—connect people in conversation through a joint virtual space, but FB is not a “Friend” to us when we fail to use due diligence in researching the identity of those persons asking to be our friend. What are some tips in this regard to help the people that may not be social-media savvy enough to protect themselves and their virtual friends on Facebook?

If you give someone access to your Facebook page, it is like opening the doors of the entryway of your house. If someone looks suspicious through your door’s peephole, you are not likely to let them in. You can be tricked when someone gets past your doorway defenses by convincing you that they are not suspicious. Each of us has the responsibility to at least try to verify the identity of those people or “Friends” whom we let past our doors.

 Entry points 

There are lots of ways we let people into our Facebook houses. We “click through” ads or  we “like” a promoted page. We also give access to our “houses” by posting on our own FB pages. When we share a post, it is like we are accompanying it through the door of our friend’s houses, right alongside our own reputation for accuracy and truth. Not everyone sees this as a fact, but it is true. A shared post that looks good and is slickly produced doesn’t seem to have to merit that same value for truth as we appreciate in its value for coolness. However, a good looking post might not be true or worth the time it takes to share it. We certainly should not share anything, without checking where it came from; we might be letting past our doors–and past our friends’ doors–a wolf in sheep’s clothing. If you are interested in finding out more about what I might mean with that, check out this blog, “Quizzing the Quizzes, Part 1 & Part 2” at susanwlavelle.com.

Verify as best you can

Specifically, for people that don’t know this already, if someone asks to friend you, you should verify who they are as best you can. I am not suggesting that you hire a private eye or do a background check on everyone who asks to “Friend” you, anymore than you do that for the people that you let in your entry hall. Rather, I am suggesting that you do the simple things that you can easily do to check if they are the person that they say they are. Someone may still get past your efforts, which is why you don’t put your personal or financial details online—just in case someone has gotten onto your friend’s list who is not who they are supposed to be.

This is the reason that you don’t want to share—or let someone else share—your cool pictures from Aruba while you are still laying on the beach, because you don’t know who will see it and decide to check out your empty house before you return. If you have a fantastic, world-class security system that can handle anything, then fine, go ahead and post away while you are gone. For most of us, however, waiting until you get back is soon enough to post those fun pics.

Easy ways to vet a profile

So, what are some easy things a person can do to vet the friend requests received on Facebook and prevent hacking your friend’s and your own profile? A big way that profiles are “hacked” is when legitimate pictures and details from real profile pages are poached off a real page (copied and/or downloaded) and then used to set up shadow profiles of legitimate users; the scammers then send out friend requests from that shadow profile to that original and real person’s friends, in order to get the person’s friends to also “friend” the shadow profile. Our memories don’t always register that we are already so-and-so’s friend when we glance at these shadow requests; often, we just click without thinking or doing any checks about the validity of the request. I have done it myself several times. However, whenever you receive a Friend request, whether it is from Facebook or on Facebook Messenger, the first thing you should do is to click through the requester’s name to look at that profile before you add them to your own friend’s list. If you think that you are friends already, chances are, you are friends already.

These few tips should become a natural part of our Facebook home life; many users already do all these things and more, but some do not. Nothing will guarantee that you will be protected from scammers who invade your Facebook house intending to gain your confidence and to gain your contact list and their info. However, becoming a better citizen of the Facebook community will help you be a better friend to your “Friends” and to your self. Check out my next post, “Shadow Profiles on Facebook, Part 2.”