More than 500 million Facebook accounts are for sale on Telegram

The Verge said that in mid-January 2021, a bot appeared on Telegram selling the phone numbers of more than 500 million accounts on Facebook.

Alon Gal - co-founder of Hudson Rock company was the one who discovered illegal trafficking on Telegram and warned the online community about this incident. He said: 'It is disturbing to see such a large database being sold in tech crime groups, which would seriously damage our privacy, facilitating the bad deception and many other scams ".

With a bot on Telegram, we just need to enter a person's Facebook ID to find that person's phone number and vice versa. But pay a small fee calculated by the amount of "credits", equivalent to 20 USD, if you buy more there will be a promotion package of 5,000 USD for 10,000 credits. The bot contains information of Facebook accounts from all over the US, Canada, UK, Australia and 15 other countries. This is information leaked from a flaw on Facebook in 2019, although the vulnerability was fixed soon after, but hackers quickly stole the data of many accounts. At the time of the incident, there were rumors that the phone numbers of many famous people were leaked out.

More than 500 million Facebook accounts are for sale on Telegram Picture 1 More than 500 million Facebook accounts are for sale on Telegram Picture 1

Just send the ID number of the account to receive the corresponding phone number

Data from 2019 may not be accurate as of now. However, those who linked their phone numbers to their Facebook accounts before August 2019 should still be careful. In 2018, users discovered that Facebook required a phone number for two-factor authentication not to protect customers but to collect information to run ads.

More than 500 million Facebook accounts are for sale on Telegram Picture 2 More than 500 million Facebook accounts are for sale on Telegram Picture 2

The Telegram bot database comes from an information leak on Facebook in 2019 and 2020

According to Alon Gal, a flaw on Facebook in early 2020 was a loophole for hackers to see the phone numbers linking Facebook accounts and create a data warehouse containing the information of 533 million users globally. "It is important for Facebook to notify users of this incident so that they do not fall victim to cyber attacks," Alon Gal stressed.