The Facebook ‘Following Me’ hoax has left many people freaked out and blocking complete strangers, here is the info you need to know and pass along.
If I am being completely honest with you, I fell for this hoax hook, line and sinker! It came into the office around three days ago and just seemed to be solid and so I spent 20 minutes blocking a list of people who appeared to be following my private profile.
What made the situation even creepier was the fact that it appeared that the same people were following everyone in my group of friends, office and family.
Here is where it gets a little funnier… After the panicked rampage of blocking apparent stalkers, I passed the message along to family and got a hilarious response back from my mother, who insisted it wasn’t real and started to explain why. She ended her informative chat with “Sorry you wasted your time on nothing”… Thanks, mom!
The entire thing is embarrassing because it is usually me that points out fake stories, hoaxes and scams to family members.
So here is the how to tell it is a hoax. The prompt was to type in ‘Following Me’ and a list of about 10 people pops up. If you look at those names, they all contain the letters ME or are similar to the prompt ‘Following Me’. So to test it, I typed in ‘Following Us’, the same thing occurred only this time all the names contained the letters US.
Finally, I typed in ‘Following Go’ because that makes no sense and it brought up about 50 names containing the letters GO.
When in doubt head over to Snopes to be sure! They debunk and confirm hacks and scams that occur around the internet. According to them, the hoax started in January 2017 but it was called ‘paid spies’ and has been adapted to the following hoax.
“Block Users” search box simply returns “profiles of [users] who have used those particular words somewhere on their profile [or] in a place that’s visible to the individual, as in a public post.” The list returned by this search neither includes people who are furtively following you, nor persons employed to spy on you by Facebook security.” – Snopes