A Telegram bot is selling Facebook users’ phone numbers for $20 a pop

Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.

Back in 2019, a Facebook vulnerability lead to information of over 500 million users being leaked. The information contained phone numbers for these users, even users that have their phone number hidden

While that vulnerability was patched, the data contained through the breach has been popping up on shady forums and more. Now, a Telegram bot is actually selling the data, as reported by Motherboard.

The Telegram bot was discovered by researcher Alon Gal, and they detail how it works. Essentially, someone can ping the bot with a Facebook user ID and the Telegram bot will offer a redacted version of the information. Then, the person posing the query can pay in “credits” to unlock the information. One credit costs $20 and there are bulk deals available as well.

https://twitter.com/UnderTheBreach/status/1349671294808285184

While data dumps and other things are traded all the time, the data is typically overwhelming and requires some level of technical know-how to really utilize it. This bot takes that legwork out of the equation, making it that much more worrying.

As of the time of this writing, the bot is currently still up and running, but hopefully Telegram will soon take action against it to get it removed.

Have any thoughts on this? Surprised that someone is selling data through a Telegram bot? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• It looks like Facebook plans on keeping Donald Trump’s ban in place
• Twitter wants to crowdsource fact-checking with Birdwatch
• Parler is (kinda) back thanks to a Russian tech company
• Privacy-focused social site MeWe is gaining millions of new users