Personal Information Of More Facebook Users Is Being Sold On The Dark Web

The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is allegedly being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally.

If authentic, this may constitute one of the biggest and most significant Facebook data dump to date.

The thread advertising the claimed data scrape has disappeared from the hacker forum.

The forum poster and alleged seller however was not banned (usually what happens when scam allegations turn out to be true).

It is possible the thread was taken down due to a request by Facebook:

Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman, commented to Newsweek, “We’re investigating this claim and have sent a takedown request to the forum that’s advertising the alleged data.”

The forum seller has today responded and denied the scam accusations, continuing to claim that the data is real. The seller commented they are willing to cooperate with administrators of the forum to prove the authenticity of the data.

Yesterday, a number of forum posters accused the seller of not delivering the promised data after payment was made.

It is seemingly unrelated to an earlier 2021 Facebook data dump, where 500 million users were affected.

Highlights:

• Data scrapers are selling sensitive personal data on 1.5 billion Facebook users.
• Data contains users’: name, email, phone number, location, gender, and user ID.
• Data appears to be authentic.
• Personal data obtained through web scraping.
• Data can be utilized for phishing and account takeover attacks.
• Sold data claimed to be new from 2021.

Some prospective buyers claim they were scammed by the seller and no data was delivered after payment was made

Seller responds to scam accusations. Claims is willing to cooperate with forum administrators to prove the authenticity of the data

In late September 2021, a user of a known hacker forum posted an announcement claiming to possess the personal data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users. The data is currently up for sale on the respective forum platform, with potential buyers having the opportunity to purchase all the data at once or in smaller quantities.

One prospective buyer claims to have been quoted $5,000 for the data of 1 million Facebook user accounts.

According to the forum poster, the data provided contains the following personal information of 

Facebook users:

• Name
• Email
• Location
• Gender
• Phone number
• User ID