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If you’ve been on Facebook for a while you’ve probably seen a wide variety of quiz-style posts pop up in your Newsfeed.
There are many variations of these posts, but the most common ones are of the “What is your spirit animal?” or “Which celebrity do you look like?” variety.
These posts can seem like they’re nothing more than just a bit of innocent fun, but the truth is some of them are quite dangerous.
The most dangerous quizzes typically require you to agree to enable an app in order to participate in the quiz.
Once you have enable the app and accepted its permissions it will proceed to “mine” your Facebook account and steal your personal information, your photos and even a digital copy of your Friends List.
The app (or the scammer behind it) will then use that stolen information to do any or all of the following:
1 – Use the information mined from your account (your name, mailing address, phone number, and birthdate) to steal your identity.
Note: This is one important reason why you should remove as much personal info as possible from your profile if any of it’s on there.
2 – Create a fake “clone” Facebook account in your name.
3 – Use that fake account to send fraudulent friend requests to your Facebook friends and then perpetrate various scams on the ones that innocently accept them.
4 – Install additional malicious apps on your account that you don’t even know about.
5 – Write posts on the Timeline of your real account and make it appear that they were written by you.
6 – Send fraudulent (and dangerous) instant messages to your Facebook friends.
And guess what? These activities could well go on for days, weeks or even months before you even find out about them (assuming that you ever do find out).
Bottom line: If an invitation to participate in a quiz similar to the ones mentioned above lands in your Newsfeed it would be best to simply delete the post and move on because interacting with the post in any way could very well cause problems for both you and your friends.
And by the way, if you’ve ever interacted with even one quiz-type post on Facebook in the past and strange things are have been happening with your account, chances are there’s at least one malicious app enabled on it.
For that reason I recommend checking your list of enabled apps to make sure there are no apps enabled that you don’t know about. If you find one or more apps that you aren’t familiar with I recommend that you remove them right away.