Why you should lock your Facebook Profile now

In past 30 days, someone impersonated me & my brother on Facebook, added our respective friends & asked them for money

P.S. I have halted my bike trip, parked my bike at a friend’s place in Chandigarh & took a flight to Bangalore on April 21. Why I did so ? I got an inner calling plus a lot of my well wishers including my family were paranoid because of increasing covid cases. For a long time, I felt I am safer in the mountains but finally, my inner calling changed & I decided to follow it :). There are still a couple of ride posts left which I will be publishing soon.

Today, at around 11 AM, I saw message from my brother in our family group where he had put a screenshot of someone named Amit asking for money. I was a bit confused as to why my brother was asking for money. He then clarified that it was sent to him by a friend. There is someone who has made fake profile of my brother, added his friends & pinging them for money on Facebook messenger

Person with fake profile. Link - https://www.facebook.com/friends?profile_id=100059675407622

A month back, my wife’s sister reported a similar incident. One of her friend said that someone impersonated me & asked him for money saying that Ashish (I) has run out of money. It sounded genuine considering I was doing pan India tour.

One quick thing we all should do is to lock our facebook profile (I just now did). It is fairly easy to do. Go to Facebook app or facebook.com on your mobile phone, click on your own profile picture to open your profile (in my case, it was m.facebook.com/pocha.sharma), click the 3 dots next to Edit Profile & it has the option to Lock profile.

Now, nobody else except your friend will be able to download pictures from your profile. That way, they will not be able to make a fake profile of yours.

Edit - Facebook will not show any of your posts, pictures except for a low resolution DP (Display Picture) of yours. That way, they will neither able to see nor download the pictures from your profile, to create a fake profile of yours.

Another thing I did was to report the issue on the Cybercrime website - cybercrime.gov.in . I suggest that you should also do the same when you come across such incidences. You need to create your profile & it is fairly quick. Reporting also took me like 5 min. I am not sure how effective this is, but I thought of trying this out. I will update this post once I hear back from Cybercrime folks. I did the reporting from my mobile phone itself.

Please share this posts with your friends suggesting them to lock their profile. The facebook impersonation seems to be on all time high now a days.