Almost every day, you can log onto your social media account and someone has tagged someone else and posted “Have you been hacked? I got a friend request from you and I am already your friend”.  Most often, the person has not  been “hacked”, instead, scammers have cloned their profile.  So what’s the difference between cloned and hacked?

Cloning is very easy for scammers to do.  They simply steal a picture from a person’s profile and set up a new account with that person’s name.  The person who has been cloned has not done anything wrong.  No one has accessed their social media account, and frankly, there is nothing that can be done, except report the fake profile to the social media site.  Changing your password on your “real profile” isn’t going to stop scammers from cloning your profile.

If a person is “hacked” that means someone has managed to figure out the password to the account, changed it, and that person has no control of their account anymore.  This is much rarer than being cloned.

Since there is really no way to stop from being cloned, the real problem is people accepting messages or “friending” the cloned accounts.  So how do you know if the person messaging you or sending you a friend request is real or cloned?  Here are some things to remember if you suspect a cloned account:

  1. Check to see if you are already friends with the person on social media.  If you are, send them a private message letting them know or just report the fake profile.
  2. If you aren’t sure if the person is “real”, look and see how many friends they have.  If they have just a handful of friends, it is very likely you are looking at a cloned profile.
  3. If you are friends in “real life” and notice that you don’t know any of their friends, there’s a good chance you are looking at a cloned profile.
  4. Be wary of private messages.  If it is someone you know and message often and they send a message that sounds “off”, don’t reply – that only empowers the scammers.
  5. Don’t post “I think you’ve been hacked” where the public can see it.  If you feel you must notify the person – send them a private message on the account you know is them.  Posting messages like that on social media gives a “heads up” for other scammers to clone the same accounts.