My Facebook Account Has Been Hacked

PLEASE DELETE ME FROM YOUR FACEBOOK FRIENDS

First thing this morning people started contacting me and asking if I was ok. My first thought was “yeah I feel great”. My second thought was “why are they asking me this?”.

Come to find out someone is masquerading as me in my actual Facebook profile asking people for money to get me home from London. If I really was stuck in London, I don’t think I would be using Facebook as my primary means to raise money to get home. No offense.

The best thing you can do is remove me as your Facebook friend and ask your friends to do the same. I’m really sorry for any troubles this may have caused you today. I’ve been in touch with Facebook and so far I haven’t heard back from them. Hopefully Facebook can do something about this and it will all be over soon.

More information
http://www.itp.net/blogs/559-the-sharp-end-of-a-facebook-hack

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 8:34 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Tags: $600, facebook, hacked, joeymarchy, london

rama

This is a very comprehensive article on Facebook Impostors
. Indeed, we have to be careful in handling our personal accounts. We just cannot fall victims to these scammers.

JasonCDG

Looks like the scam has become pretty popular, it's on cnn.com now:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/05/facebook.imp...

Marisa

By the way, I had a simple password of six letters. I also have twitter.

Marisa

I first got hacked on yesterday morning. I got the early wake up call from a friend wondering if I needed money in London. She had just been chatting with my hacker on Facebook. I have Facebook on my Blackberry, so I noticed a notification come through for an operamail.com email address a little after that phone call. When I tried to follow the link to dispute it, I was unable to log in to my FB account since the hacker had already changed the email address. I see now that my profile does not show up on FB anymore. I can still fetch my friends' status updates through my Blackberry, but can do nothing else. Hoping to hear back from FB soon.

Joey Marchy

John,

It took a week, but Facebook re-instated my account.

John

That happened to me, too, just this morning. Fortunately, I caught it just as it started and was able to keep control of my Facebook page and I believe scared the hacker off. However, after I told Facebook they disabled my account so no clue how long before I get it back.

Kendra

Help! The same thing happened to me. I couldn't login to my account Thursday afternoon (1/22/2009). My brother-in-law informed me that someone had posted a new email addy on my profile. This was not me. I cannot reset my password b/c it is being sent to the bogus email addy. A friend told me on Friday that he had an entire chat conversation with someone posing as me who claimed I was in london, had been in the hospital, and needed money to settle my hotel bill. What a scam! I feel so violated. I just hope no one falls for the scam. My password was 8 characters and included 3 numbers spaced out in the password. There is no way someone guessed it. I filed a complaint through Facebook's website and also sent an email to abuse@facebook.com, but still haven't heard anything.

S

So far I've gone 10 days without a fix from Facebook. A week ago I was emailed by Facebook in response to my queries regarding how to regain access to my account. They asked me to answer my secret question, which I did, and then I never heard from them again. I noticed from friends' accounts that my profile has been taken offline and won't turn up in searches, but not a peep from Facebook regarding how to reset my password. Anyone else have any luck?

wadester16

Same thing happened to me this morning. I was woken by a friend asking if I was okay. I don't use twitter and my password is 11 characters (#s and letters)! Same story, same BS. I talked to the hacker too, but once I told him who I was, he defriended the account I was using. The hacker changed my registered email address to one at operamail.com, but with the same name as I had at gmail so people would believe it. Therefore when I try to have my password sent to me, it doesn't recognize my email addresses because he removed them. Interestingly, I'm still able to sign on facebook thru the facebook for iPhone app, but that app doesn't allow a user to change personal settings (I was really excited when that worked, but really disappointed when it turned out I couldn't regain control of my account.) How do I fix this!?

S

http://nathanintownsville.com/2009/hacker-sacke...

Sorry to make a mess on your blog without knowing you, but I figured you might be interested in that link because it describes how he got his Facebook access back. I haven't heard anything yet though...best of luck!

zombiebikes

-offtopic-

but thank-you so much for advertising for Zombie Bike's wednesday's workshop and movie night, we had a great turnout w/ a lot of new faces.

we really appreciate the support!

S

Thanks a bunch for responding....this scam has prevented me from doing anything productive today. My password was similar to yours...a six letter word followed by a number. I actually don't use Twitter, but I was reading on various blogs today that there have been some security breaches on Twitter over the last few days. I've been able to come up with a few more examples of this hack: http://kovacsminutes.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/m...

http://rickmccharles.com/2009/01/08/facebook-ac...

And I could go on... In any case, I used a friends account to actually have a conversation with the "hacker". I told him I was the account owner and just wanted my account back and offered him 40 bucks to change the password and email back. I said as a measure of faith, i wanted him to tell me first how he obtained my password. He told me he was a Nigerian orphan who was trying to feed himself, and that he used a computer program to get my password. He signed off soon after that. This scam has really been taking off since the 8th of January and I'm wondering how many people are affected. I've been scouring my computers for any kind of malware and have found nothing. I hope we find a solution to this. I'm getting calls every so often from friends wondering if I'm "okay in London".

Joey Marchy

I wouldn't say my password is weak, but it wasn't REAL strong. It was something like "apple4me". I consider myself pretty computer savvy too (I'm a programmer at a web development company) so I thought phishing would have been a long shot too.

Plus my Facebook interaction is pretty limited to posting status updates via twitter.

Do you use twitter? Is your twitter username and password the same the same as your facebook login?

S

Hey-

I found your blog on Google while trying to find a solution to my own hacking mishap. I had the same exact thing happen to me this morning when I was called by friends asking if I was *really* stranded in a London airport and needing urgent wire transfers to fix the problem. I've been looking online for similar issues and the oldest one I found was your link above from last November, but it really looks like this particular scam has picked up in the last couple days. I'm pretty computer savvy and wouldn't fall for any of the phishing schemes that I've seen out there, so I'm wondering if this was a breach on Facebook's end. I had a relatively weak 7 character password, but I don't think it could have been guessed....did you have a similarly weak password? Just trying to find out what's happening to everyone.