Lisa Crosby-Torres is an active Facebook user.
"I probably have about 1,700 friends on Facebook," she said.
She was confused recently when friends started reaching out to her outside of Facebook.
"I have a bunch of text messages and email from friends saying, 'Someone’s impersonating you,'" Crosby-Torres said.
Sure enough, a quick Facebook search revealed someone had created a profile using Crosby-Torres' name, and they were "friending" her friends. When Crosby-Torres reported it to Facebook, she didn’t get the response she expected.
"It said that your account's been shut down for impersonating someone that you aren’t," Crosby-Torres said.
Facebook removed Crosby-Torres' profile, not the impostor’s.
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"I tried to log into my Facebook account, and I couldn’t log into it," Crosby-Torres said. "I was gone on Facebook."
Crosby-Torres was trying - unsuccessfully - to get Facebook to put her profile back up. But in the meantime, she was concerned about what the impostor was up to.
"There’s a reason they’re doing this," Crosby-Torres said. "They’re not doing it for fun."
Crosby-Torres is right, according to the identity theft experts at Lifelock.
"The next step in this scam is typically they then start asking for money," said Paige Hanson of Lifelock.
Warnings about scams like this are all over the internet. According to the FTC, they play out in a few ways. The impostor may tell Crosby-Torres' friends that she’s stranded overseas and needs money via wire transfer, or the imposter may say there’s an emergency involving Crosby-Torres' daughter, and she needs cash quickly.
Luckily, Crosby-Torres’ impostor didn’t have time to get this far. When we reached out to Facebook, it immediately took down the imposter’s profile and restored Crosby-Torres’ page.
Crosby-Torres is back on Facebook, but a little more cautiously.
"As much as I love Facebook and the community it’s created, there’s always going to be bad people out there," she said.
In a statement, Facebook apologized to Crosby-Torres and said the authentic profile was removed by mistake. It also said that impersonating someone isn’t permitted on its site, and it’s developing a new alert system to tell people when it discovers other accounts using their profile name and photo.
