By Jennifer Abel writing for ConsumerAffairs.COM
It’s easy for scammers to impersonate genuine Facebook identities, including your real-life friends and relatives
If you’re familiar with Facebook and the various types of scams there, then you already know to be suspicious of messages or “friend” requests from people you don’t know. But it’s very easy for scammers to steal your friends’ Facebook identities, so even if you can trust your friends in real life, you still shouldn’t trust them on Facebook.
Elizabeth Holtan, a blogger for the Better Business Bureau, made that discovery this week, and wrote about what she called “the Facebook Friend request scam.”
It’s quite simple, really: scammers choose a given Facebook account and copy as much as they can from it, including names and photographs. The scammers then make a duplicate account in the same name. Here’s what happened to Holtan: