We explain what to do if someone clones your Facebook account and impersonates you on the social networking platform.

Facebook cloning is one of the most popular types of scams on the Internet’s largest social networking. It happens when a crook creates a new Facebook account, but they use your name and your profile picture. Of course, this makes the account look like you, and the crook will try and make friends with people you know to try and trick them into doing things like sending money.

It can be frustrating, knowing that someone is pretending to be you on Facebook. But there are things you can do if it happens. We outline some important steps you should take.

1. Warn your friends. If someone if pretending to be you on Facebook, it’s probably your friends that they’re really looking to scam. Get in contact with your friends over Messenger and let them know that it is this account that they should trust, and not to trust any other accounts using your name. If they have already accepted a friend request from another account, tell them to reject it. You can also post from your timeline a message stating the same thing.

2. Find the duplicate account and report it. Facebook has a reporting option specifically for this. Go to the profile, click the three dots icon and select the reporting option. You should be able to select the “Pretending to Be Someone” option and then select “Me”.

If you can’t see the duplicate account, its means the crook has blocked you. In order to overcome this, you may need a secondary account or a friends account. Again report the profile but select “someone else” instead of “Me”. See below.

3. Hide your friends list. To stop the crook seeing your friends, make sure your friends list is hidden. You can learn how to do this right here. It’s also important to make sure your privacy settings are all private, which means the information crooks have about you is limited, which stops them copying that information to the cloned account as well.