This Facebook Hoax Is Tricking People Into Thinking Their Account Is Hacked

Over the weekend, you might have seen a wave of panicked friends in your Facebook news feeds posting warnings: Their accounts were hacked, don't accept friend requests from their accounts. Or even worse, you might have received a message, warning you that your account has been compromised.

The warning spread like wildfire, from one friend to another. The message claims that the sender received a suspicious friend request from you, and that the proper way to address this disturbing news is to immediately share the message they sent to you with all your friends.

The warning will look something like this:

"Hi....I actually got another friend request from you which I ignored so you may want to check your account. Hold your finger on the message until the forward button appears...then hit forward and all the people you want to forward too....I had to do the people individually. PLEASE DO NOT ACCEPT A NEW friendship FROM ME AT THIS TIME."

So, should you be worried with this? Well, there is some good and bad news.

The good news is that most likely, you account has not been compromised or hacked if you received this message, nor are you being impersonated on Facebook. All the warnings is a hoax and the bad news is that people are falling for it. It seems to be a case of yet another copy/paste (cloning) hoax.

According to a fact-checking website Snopes, the hoax appears to reference fears about "cloned" Facebook accounts, where would-be scammers copy the name, profile picture, and basic information from a real account to create a second, nearly identical account on Facebook. Then, they send a bunch of friend requests to the original account's friend list, to try to scam the person's unsuspecting friends.

These messages tend to go viral by tapping into real fears about the power of Facebook.