Facebook problems

“My Facebook has been hacked!” Well, probably not. It most likely has been cloned. In
other words, no-one found your Facebook password, but what they did is create a new
Facebook profile with your name and photos on it. And then they send friend requests to
your friends to eventually hit them for money.

The best way to avoid this, is to lock down your profile and make everything only visible to
your friends (and only accepting friend requests from people you know personally and are
not already friends with). Sadly, there are a number of places where you have to do this in
your settings, and it is easiest on a computer, but can also be done on a phone. So click on
your profile picture, select “Settings and Privacy” and then “Privacy”. Now under “Your
Activity”, “How people find and contact you” and “How you get message requests” change
everything to Friends, especially ‘Who can see your friends list’ and ‘Who can see your
future posts’, you can also change the audience for past posts to Friends.
Now go to Profile and Tagging and again change everything to friends and turn on
reviewing.
Now go back to your profile page and check what you have written under ‘About’ – this is
always public so make sure you do not give away to much about yourself. Especially under
Contact and basic info I would lock down your birth date.
Your profile pictures are always public, so make sure you don’t have a photo of your
address or other details.
All this will not make you totally secure, but it will make your profile less interesting to bad
actors.

Since this article was written, Facebook has actually made it a bit easier and collected most of these settings in an area called privacy review or similar (they tend to change things occasionally), which is still accessible through settings as described above.