Scammers and stalkers can now get your phone number for $20: What to do

Scammers and stalkers tin can now get your phone number for $xx: What to do

An iPhone 7 displaying a Facebook web page.

(Prototype credit: Wachiwit/Shutterstock)

Look out Facebook users, considering someone has created a database of your mobile numbers and is selling admission to information technology through an automated Telegram messaging bot, according to Vice News.

The silver lining is that the data is former. The telephone numbers and associated Facebook account data were legally "scraped" — downloaded in bulk from public Facebook pages — before April 2018, when Facebook made the scraping process more than difficult in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

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Until that month, y'all could use Facebook as a reverse-lookup phone book. Punching in a valid mobile number, even a random ane, would often reveal an associated Facebook account, including the name and location of the mobile number'south user.

Up to 500 million numbers tin can be looked up

The database, to which this enterprising Telegram account is now selling admission, seems to be a vast collection of phone numbers and associated Facebook accounts. Yous can use a number to await up a Facebook account, or a Facebook username to await up a phone number.

There may be as many as 500 one thousand thousand numbers in the database, according to one source cited by Vice News, though that figure could be exaggerated. Considering that mobile numbers aren't publicly listed in many countries, this White Pages of mobile numbers might be worth a lot of money to telemarketers, scammers, snoops, stalkers and Bitcoin thieves.

If so, the seller of this data is incentivizing customers to purchase in majority. If you look up a number and a Facebook account turns out to be associated with it, or vice versa, you've got to pay one "credit" for all the information.

A single credit sells for $20 U.S., but there are steep discounts to pre-buy credits in blocks, upwardly to 10,000 credits for $5,000 U.S., or fifty cents each.

Vice News sprang for a couple of tests and found that the database "independent the existent phone number of a Facebook user who tries to keep this number private."

What can you practice most revealed mobile numbers?

And then what tin can you practice well-nigh this? Not a lot, we're afraid.

If yous have real enemies or stalkers who might employ this lookup service to rails you downwards and do you harm, y'all could change your mobile number if it hasn't been changed in the past 2 or three years.

Ditto if yous ain a lot of Bitcoin and are at grave risk of having your phone number, and all that digital currency, stolen outright by a number-porting scam and the resulting failure of two-factor authentication (2FA).

But for near people, irresolute their mobile numbers won't exist worth it. The data has been out there for years. It'south probable been exposed in several previous Facebook data dumps, including in September 2019, December 2019 and, almost recently, April 2020.

Facebook asks everyone who installs Facebook on a smartphone to input their mobile number. Information technology as well encourages those who don't use its mobile apps to sign up for 2FA, in which a special code is texted to a mobile number, which of course Facebook and so needs to have.

Yous should get into your Facebook account's privacy settings to make sure that your phone number is gear up to "Friends", or even improve, "Only Me." (You should also set your birthday to "But Me" in Settings --> Your Facebook Data --> Access Your Information --> Profile Information --> Most --> Contact and Bones Info.)

To accept an even more drastic step, you can take the steps here to remove your phone number from Facebook entirely. It's too late to forbid your number from beingness part of the existing collections of Facebook-linked numbers, but at least you'll know information technology won't happen again.

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Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom's Guide focused on security and privacy. He has also been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul driver, code monkey and video editor. He's been rooting around in the information-security space for more than 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom's Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown up in random Telly news spots and even moderated a panel discussion at the CEDIA dwelling-engineering briefing. Y'all tin can follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.