FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 29, 2018
Contact: Matt Baca (505) 270-7148
Albuquerque, NM — Today, Attorney General Hector Balderas issued the following scam alert warning New Mexicans to be extra cautious about people pretending to be able to help them with their Facebook data in the wake of the Facebook privacy breach. On the heels of the furor over Facebook’s sharing of subscriber data, new Facebook scam artists are calling people in New Mexico, attempting to access data the subscriber may not wish to share.
“Never share your personal information with a stranger, no matter who the caller pretends to be,” Attorney General Hector Balderas said. “If you need your Facebook information fixed, go to Facebook and access your account settings and fix it that way. Please, do NOT rely on a stranger to fix it, even if the stranger pretends to be a Facebook employee or contractor.”
The new Facebook scam works like this: (1) an imposter scam caller purports to be from Facebook and offers to help you fix your account to avoid sharing your data with others; (2) the caller asks for your subscriber information and related data; (3) if you give the information to this caller, the caller can access all your data and, perhaps, the data of all your Facebook friends. The Attorney General, who is actively seeking answers from Facebook regarding how and why it shared the data of some 50 million of its subscribers, has warned everyone not to share the information the Facebook scammers request.
Anyone who gets a Facebook scam call can help others by reporting it to the Federal TradeCommission. The site for reporting a Facebook scam (which is categorized as an “imposter
scam” because the caller pretends to be someone else), is: https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/GettingStarted?NextQID=213&Url=%23%26panel1-2#crnt
Consumers can also always report any issues to the Office of the Attorney General at nmag.gov, or call 1-844-255-9210 toll-free-statewide.
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