Don’t Accept Anything from Facebook Hacker Fabrizio Brambilla-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
Facebook users have been warned not to accept anything from hacker Fabrizio Brambilla on Messenger because he will be able to hack all of their friends’ accounts.
The Truth:
A warning not to accept anything from a Facebook hacker named Fabrizio Brambilla in August 2017 is just the latest in a long line of false warnings not to accept friend requests or messages from hackers on Facebook.
We’ve investigated a number of nearly identical false warnings over the last year. The substance of the threat — that accepting a friend request or message from a specific person will leave you and your contacts vulnerable to hacks — are generally the same. Only the name of the hacker changes. We investigated friend request warnings about supposed hackers named James Woods, Anwar Jitou, John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt and Jayden K. Smith in the months before threats about Fabrizio Brambilla surfaced in August 2017. None of them are true.
It’s not clear where the latest warning about Fabrizio Brambilla surfaced, but the sentence structure, spelling and word usage seem to indicate that it originated overseas:
There aren’t any credible reports of Facebook hackers being able to access or hack their victims’ entire list of contacts after the hacker’s friend request or message is accepted. The closest real threat is a scam in which Facebook scammers clone a victim’s profile and re-friend all of their contacts Then, the scammers message the contacts posing as the victim and ask for money. This is a scam, not a hack.
Although warnings not to accept anything from Fabrizio Brambilla aren’t legitimate, there are plenty of credible cybersecurity threats on Facebook. In fact, Facebook encourages users to not accept friend requests or Messenger chats with anybody that they’re not familiar with in real life to minimize those threats.