How a Blogger Bought 1.1 Million Facebook User Accounts for $5? Facebook Investigates

Facebook is supposed to be most unsafe and vulnerable social network on internet whose users’ data can be hacked at any time including the personal information like User IDs, addresses. The same is being probed here. A blogger recently claimed that he has bought 1.1 million Facebook users information for just $5. Now Facebook launched an investigation over this claim and wants to explore how he succeeded in accessing to the data of 1.1 million Facebook users for just paying $5.

The company, which has been freshly overwhelmed with charges that its users’ privacy is undermined, is now probing claims that how a blogger was able to buy email addresses and user IDs of its 1.1 million users  which were not openly available to general public.

In recent past, Facebook has been blamed of permitting private messages to be leaked in their new ‘timeline’ feature – an accusation which they have sturdily denied.

But now he is a Bulgairan Bogomil Shopov, a blogger and digital-rights activist, stirred the world again with his claim claims that he purchased the data huge numbers of Facebook users including their names, user IDs and email addresses, NBC News reports.

He also blamed Facebook by saying that the company asked him to delete his post that discloses his deal.

Shopov claims he purchased the entire info from a user named ‘Mertem’ on digital odd-jobs board Gigbucks, where subscribers offer to do tasks for payments ranging between $5 to $50.

Mertem actually wrote in the sales description;

‘The information in this list has been collected through our Facebook apps and consists only of active Facebook users, mostly from the US, Canada, UK and Europe,’

Notably, this data info can be potentially used to deceitfully boost a brand’s Facebook page likes and fans numbers.

Such information is absolutely important for companies looking for having an access to target audiences and publicize their services to them. Facebook promised to probe how the data entries were hacked, Forbes Magazine claims.

Also, a Facebook spokesman told the media;

‘Facebook is vigilant about protecting our users from those who would try to expose any form of user information. In this case, it appears someone has attempted to scrape information from our site.

We have dedicated security engineers and teams that look into and take aggressive action on reports just like these.

We continue to investigate this specific individual.’

Blogger’s second post about this deal reveals that Facebook’s ‘policy team’ contacted him promising to probe into the purchase, but requested him to keep their whole conversation private.

A Facebook employee working at  ’policy’ department purportedly asked Shopov;

We would like you to send us this file, delete it, tell us if you have given a copy of it to someone, give us the website from which you bought it including all transactions with it and the payment system and remove a couple of things from your blog.

Recently, Facebook announced a boost of 32 percent in third-quarter revenue to $1.26 billion, mainly due to aggressive advertising growth and gains in mobile beyond expectations.

via: Daily Mail

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