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Oh great, there is now another Facebook phone number database for sale

This is separate from the recent 533 million user breach.

Facebook logo on smartphone screen
Image: Unsplash

There’s Yet Another Facebook Phone Number Database (YAFPND) bot selling your data to whoever wants to pay for it. Yes, just over a week after the last reported database of 533 million numbers is another one, with a Telegram bot that has access to phone numbers that aren’t included in that half a billion.

Motherboard verified that the data handed out by the bot is legit, even if the bot isn’t. How? By calling some of the phone numbers to check they were accurate. Yikes, I can only imagine how freaked out those people were.

This time, the bot is set up to give phone numbers associated with users who have liked a particular Page on Facebook. Users have to “identify the unique identification code of the Facebook Page they want to get phone numbers from,” give that code to the bot and pay the dollar amount that the bot asks. That cost seems to be calculated on the number of likes that the Page has, with Motherboard‘s own Facebook Page costing $539 for the nearly 135k records.

READ MORE: Verizon users are being scammed by their own phone numbers

Oh, and Pages with low follower counts? The bot gives those away for free if the Page has less than 100 likes. The data returned by the bot includes the user’s full name, phone number, and gender, and not every person who “likes” a particular page is guaranteed to return information. Motherboard thinks that the dataset the bot is searching through is an older one, based on their testing if it could return their own phone number on Pages they had recently liked.

That’s bad enough, but there’s a kicker – none of the phone numbers they tested on Have I Been Pwned showed up as breached. That means they’re not part of the 533 million numbers that were already for sale on hacking forums. With Facebook having 2.8 billion monthly users, that’s a significant percentage of the userbase that now has their personal phone number available to anyone who wants to use it for nefarious means.

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Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere. His hobbies include photography, animation, and hoarding Reddit gold.

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