What should you do if you get a second Facebook friend request

We explain what Facebook users should do if they receive a suspicious friend request from someone they are already friends with on the social network.

It may be a scenario you are familiar with. A notification that you’ve received a friend request. You tap on the icon and you see that someone you are already friends with on Facebook has sent you another friend request.

So, what’s going on?

There has been plenty of “advice” circulating on the subject, including a rather confused viral message that people were sending each other even if they didn’t get a second friend request.

So if you really do get a second friend request, it is possible that crooks are trying to target you with a Facebook cloning scam. This is when crooks create a new account with the same name and profile photo as one of your friends in the hope of tricking you into accepting the request from that duplicate account. Once accepting, the crooks – posing as your friend – can try and orchestrate any number of scams on you.

Sponsored Content. Continued below...

So if you get a second friend request from someone you are already friends with on Facebook, here is what you need to do.

Confirm with your friend it’s not them.

Facebook users often have legitimate reasons for creating a second account. For example they may have created a “business facing” account, or they may have lost the password to their old account. As such the first thing you should do (before you accept the request) is verify that it is your friend, and the easiest way to do that is to talk to them outside of Facebook; preferably in person or on the phone.

If the friend request isn’t real, you should reject the friend request.

Let your friend know…

If your friend indicates that they know nothing of the account that sent you a friend request, then you will know it is a cloning scam. The second step is to simply let your friend know what has happened, and that someone has set up an account in their name. That friend can then warn their own friends, since the crook is likely to send many friend requests, not only you, but to other users.

Sponsored Content. Continued below...

Report the account…

You can report the cloned Facebook account (without accepting the friend request.) Simply go to the profile and click the three dots icon and select the report option. Select the Pretending to be someone option and then select a friend. Instruct your friend to do the same (though they can select the me option since the account is pretending to be them.)

Get mutual friends to report the account too…

Once you and your friends have warned friends of the clone account, you can get mutual friends to report the account in the same way you did.

Tell your friend to hide their friends list!

To stop this sort of thing happening in the future, we always recommend hiding your friends list so crooks don’t clone your account. Do this yourself and get your friend to do it as well, so crooks won’t know who to send friend requests to if they do clone an account.

We have instructions on how to do this on the desktop and app versions of Facebook here.