According to Privacy Affairs website, a member of a known forum for hackers claimed to be in possession of the information in late September and offered to sell it in chunks to others on the forum.

One user of the forum claimed to have Facebook user’s information which include name, email address, location, gender, phone number and user Id. The person also claims to gotten an amount of $5,000 for the information of 1 million users.

Samples shared by the user appear to have been authentic, according to Privacy Affairs. The outlet also checked the information against previous leaks and found that the hacker claimed to be in charge of a four-year-old data scraping operation with 18,000 clients.

However, several users on the forum reported that they had not received anything after sending money to the original poster which could possibly indicate that the alleged leak can be a scam.

The traders claim to have obtained the data by scraping rather than hacking or compromising individual users’ accounts. Scraping is a process of web data extraction or harvesting where publicly available data is accessed and organized into lists and databases.

The majority of such data is obtained from simply scrapping Facebook profiles that have been set to “Public” by their owners.

Another illegal method of data scraping is through fake Facebook surveys or quizzes which usually, used to obtain users’ personal data. Every time someone enters one of these surveys or quizzes, they permit the creators of these games to view their personal Facebook information such as full name, email, phone number, location, gender, and more.

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