Facebook imposter imposter?

June 10, 2022 9:12 AM

Since May 20th, I've gotten 5 messages from Facebook (purportedly) that make me worry that someone might be trying to get my account taken down. But people accidentally use my email address to sign up for things all the time, so it could be innocuous. Is there any way I can tell what's up without attempting to deal with the clusterduck that is Facebook support? And either way, what should I do?

So I've gotten a couple of emails like this:

Hi [my first name redacted],

Hi,

Thanks for your report. We'll review the information you provided and get back to you when we have an update on your report. In the meantime, you can review our Community Standards to learn more about what is and isn't allowed on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards?ref=cr We appreciate your patience.

Thanks,

The Facebook Team

Once I've received a follow-up:

Hi [my first name redacted],

Thanks for sending us something from our ID list. Unfortunately, we can't see enough information to confirm your identity. This may be because the photo or scan that you sent us:
- Was too blurry to read the info
- Was too dark or wasn't taken in a well-lit room
- Was missing the required info or had the required info covered up

The info we need to see is:
- Your name
- Your photo
- Your date of birth

If you'd like to learn more about the types of things that we can use to confirm your identity, please visit the Help Center:
https://www.facebook.com/help/159096464162185?ref=cr

Once we confirm your identity we'll help you move forward. Thanks for working with us to sort this out.

Thanks

In both cases, the sender is a string of characters @support.facebook.com; the mouseover on the link does indeed indicate it goes to their community standards page; looking at full headers shows nothing fishy. So it does seem to come from Facebook.

There's nothing in my support history showing a report there--not that I expected there to be, but I thought I'd check.

My password on this account is a generated one that has not been exposed in any leak that I know of, and isn't shared with any other account. 2FA is on.

So what's happening?

1. Best-case and I think most likely scenario: one of my confused buddies who does not understand that my email address is not their email address is stubbornly trying to get into what they think is their Facebook account, or something? which presumably will not work? (right???)

2. Someone is maliciously trying to get my account specifically taken down. Extremely unlikely, but there's been some shitty online harassment happening in a professional community of which I am very (very) marginally a part, and although I've never been targeted, the harassers' activities escalated in a broad way right around...May 20th.

Can I figure out what's happening? What, if anything, should I be doing?

posted by wintersweet to Computers & Internet