Facebook Users’ Phone Numbers Are Being Sold Through A Telegram Bot

If you ever associated your phone number with your Facebook account in the past couple of years, then you might want to take note that there is a chance your phone number could be shopped around online. This is according to a report from Motherboard in which they are reporting that a Telegram bot is selling access to a database containing these phone numbers.

Speaking to Motherboard, security researcher Alon Gal claimed that the bot was selling access to a database that contains over 500 million phone numbers linked to Facebook users. “It is very worrying to see a database of that size being sold in cybercrime communities, it harms our privacy severely and will certainly be used for smishing and other fraudulent activities by bad actors.”

It should be noted that this isn’t based on a new hack. The initial leak of Facebook users’ phone numbers was due to a vulnerability that was fixed back in 2019, but we suppose once data has been leaked out, there’s really no getting it back. This means that if you associated your phone number with Facebook prior to the company patching the issue in August 2019, your info could be part of it.

There’s really not much one can do about it now. You could close your current account and get a new number, although that could pose some logistical challenges, so the best thing to do is keep an eye out on your bills to make sure that there are no fraudulent charges.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook, Hack, Privacy, Security, telegram