Facebook User? Your Phone Number Is On Sale For Rs. 1,500

Amidst all the controversies revolving around Facebook, the company is yet again in the news, even this time it is about user privacy. You can now buy a phone number of a Facebook user for just $20 via a Telegram bot. And that's not all, you can buy the phone numbers of the Facebook users in bulk at a discounted price.

According to a series of tweets from the security researcher Alon Gal, more than 533 million user's information is currently on sale, including phone numbers. According to the report, these details were obtained in 2019, before Facebook fixed a massive vulnerability.

It is reported that the Telegram bot has information about the users from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and 15 other countries. As of now, there is no information if it also contains data of the Indian Facebook users. If you joined Facebook before 2019 and gave details like your phone number, then, there is a high chance that even your data will be available for purchase.

If you have a Facebook user ID of the person, then, the same can be used to find details like the phone number using the Telegram bot. Of course, there is a price to obtain this information. For a single credit, you have to pay $20, or you can pay $5,000 to get as many as 10,000 phone numbers.

Telegram bot has been active since January 12, 2021, and it only has data from on or before 2019. So, you might not be able to find the contact detail of the user, who joined after 2019 even if you pay $20.

Though this is not the first time, where, one can buy details of a Facebook user, it is alarming to see that now this information is available for everyone. A foul-minded user can get information like a phone number just to annoy a certain user, and it's high-time, services like Telegram takes these things seriously and remove them from their platform.

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