More than half of Facebook users’ phones are listed for sale on Telegram

Someone has acquired a huge database of Facebook users’ phone numbers, and is currently selling those data using the Telegram bot. According to security expert Alon Gal, the person behind the bot claims to own the information of more than 533 million Facebook users, stemming from a Facebook security vulnerability from 2019.

With such a huge amount of data, buying and selling is not easy. There will be an exchange between the data owner and the buyer of the data. Owners also cannot provide the entire database to the buyer. So using a Telegram bot can solve these problems.

A bot allows anyone to do the following. That is if they have a person’s Facebook ID, they can find out the phone number and vice versa. Of course, access to this database cannot be free. Owners are currently offering credits to access this database, for $ 20 a credit and $ 5,000 for 10,000 credit.

Security expert Alon Gal says the bot has been around since January 2021, and anyone can pay to access it. Although all the data is pulled from 2019, it’s quite old, but not everyone changes their phone numbers as often. That is why this huge database is still very valuable.

Currently, the bot has not been processed by Telegram, but it is still allowed to function. It’s like a vending machine, which anyone who walks past can pay to buy it.

Reference: theverge