Cloning of Facebook profiles has been a common issue now for some years, despite this the team at Facebook have still not come up with a solution to stop this which to many is surprising. Facebook profiling cloning is when a fraudster creates an exact clone of your profile and then sends friend requests to your friends. There can be a couple of objectives from this, in some cases monetary gain by scamming them or more simply to be abusive in your name to your friends. So what can you do to stop your profile from being cloned?
Step 1 – Lock down your friends list
The scammers need to know who your friends are to be able to send them friend requests, therefore if you ensure that your friends list is not visible this is one of the easiest sure-fire ways to stop your profile being cloned.
Step 2 – Don’t accept friend requests from people you don’t know
With your Facebook friends list locked down, the only way a potential scammer can now get access to your friends list is if you add them as a friend. Resist the temptation to increase the friends count by adding anyone who asks for a friend request, if you don’t know the person then simply ignore.
Step 3 – Perform a complete privacy check-up and lock down your profile to friends only
This can be performed by clicking on the padlock on the top right of Facebook and selecting “Privacy check-up”. Within this section you can select what information is shared and with whom such as your location and birthday.
The next step is to view what your profile looks like at the public level, this can be done by clicking on the 3 dots and selecting “view as”.
You might want to consider how your photos and location sensitive posts are viewed as a public user.
You can remove sections (Such as the groups you are a member of) by clicking on “More” and selecting “Manage Sections”. Now simply un-tick the sections to remove them from your profile completely.
Summary
By locking down your Facebook friends list this is the quickest way to stop your profile being cloned, however with the other steps we recommended you can also ensure you know exactly what you are sharing publicly and further reduce any scam risks related to your Facebook profile.
