It's that time of the year over again. No, non pumpkin spice lattes or offensive Halloween costumes, it's freakout time for Facebook scams. If your Facebook timeline is similar many, it'southward inundated with people clamoring on about not accepting foreign Facebook friend requests, getting hacked and more.

Over unsubstantiated fears of the Facebook friend request scam, some users are sending long Facebook messages to their friends warning non to take unsolicited Facebook friend requests.

"Heads-up!! Almost every account is existence cloned. Your picture and your name are used to create a new facebook account (they don't need your password to do this this)," the bulletin reads. "They desire your friends to add together them to their Facebook account. Your friends will call up that information technology's you lot and accept your request. From that point on they can write what they desire under your name. I have NO plans to open a new business relationship. Delight Exercise NOT accept a 2nd friend request from "me". please forrard to all your contacts Please laissez passer information technology on!!!"

There are several variations of this alert, according to Snopes, and all of them are false. You lot don't need to tell your family unit most this new craze, because information technology's not happening. "If you got a friend request from me, please ignore it," a variation of the Facebook scam alarm reads. "I've been hacked!" And no, if you accept a friend request it does not give hackers access to your profile.

Co-ordinate to WHEC, an NBC affiliate in Rochester, New York, Facebook says the bogus "scam" friend requests are not serious and are not prevalent. The visitor claims fears of the friend request scam are spreading to do fake viral chain letters.

"Claiming to be another person on Facebook violates our Community Standards, and nosotros have a dedicated team that'south tasked with helping to find and cake these kinds of scams," a spokesperson told the TV station.

This 2018 Facebook chain letter and scam is not new and seems to be recycled every few years. A quick look at the Facebook assistance forums show letters and concerns over Facebook scams from several years agone.

If you actually, really believe someone is impersonating yous by using your profile flick and friending all of your friends, click on the new profile and block them. When y'all cake someone your friend list is no longer visible. Also, this ways you likely don't demand to alter your Facebook password.

Since the Facebook friend request scam isn't real it obviously ways information technology's not connected to the Facebook security breach of more than 50 million accounts the company appear in September.

"This was a serious upshot and we worked fast to protect the security of people'south accounts and investigate what happened. We fixed the vulnerability and we reset the access tokens for a full of 90 million accounts — 50 meg that had access tokens stolen and twoscore million that were subject to a "View As" look-up in the terminal year," Facebook said in a argument. "Resetting the admission tokens protected the security of people's accounts and meant they had to log back in to Facebook or whatsoever of their apps that apply Facebook Login."