Facebook has fired more than 20 employees: it accuses them of hijacking profiles to collect bribes

A few days after the dismissal of over 11,000 employees, a new scandal is unleashed Objective, the company that brings together Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. Now the company fired and fined more than 20 people who worked for the company. They accuse them of hijack profiles and user accounts for collect bribes.

For the theft of profiles, employees and collaborators would have used the mechanism to which users turn to employees to help them recover passwords or access to their accounts due to hackers, a system known as “Oops.”

The hijacking of accounts would have developed over the past year, he said. The Wall Street Journal.

Implemented since Facebook’s inception, “Oops” was originally used for special cases such as friends or relatives of company employees, as well as business partners and public figures with a presence on that social network. However, its use has expanded in recent years, in line with the growth of the workforce: in 2020 Oops received 50,270 requestsagainst 22,000 in 2017.

As corporate sources and internal documents reveal, some of the protagonists of the latest scandal connected with external hackerswhich reportedly paid workers thousands of dollars in kickbacks in exchange for access to the hijacked accounts.

In addition to employees, the approximately 20 layoffs include contractors who worked as security guards at Meta’s facility and who had access to Facebook’s internal account recovery mechanism.

The official explanation and background in Meta

“People selling fraudulent services (such as recovering locked accounts) are always targeting online platforms, including ours, and adapting their tactics in response to commonly used detection methods in the industry,” said Andy Stone, spokesperson of Meta. He promised that the company “will continue to take appropriate action against those involved.”

This scandal once again highlights the difficulties encountered by Mark Zuckerberg’s company to support its more than 3 billion users on its platforms (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger).

The company does not have a customer service hotline, although users who cannot access their accounts typically try automated methods to reset them or attempt to reach a Meta worker by phone or email.

The revelations that The Wall Street Journal released this Thursday have a precedent. last February, Meta fired employee Reva Mandelowitza contractor for Allied Universal, after an internal investigation found he allegedly restored multiple user accounts on behalf of hackers, receiving thousands of dollars in bitcoin for his services.

Time for changes on Facebook

Earlier this month, Facebook cut its workforce for the first time since the platform’s inception. Eleven thousand employees have been fired from the company, which has been called Meta for a year, with the aim of significantly downsizing their company.

The measure reached 13% of the company’s workforce. They received 16 weeks of basic salary and an additional two weeks of salary for each year of service, as well as covering six months of medical insurance.

Zuckerberg defined the wave of layoffs as “one of the most difficult changes” which it has done in the history of the platform. “I want to take responsibility for these decisions and how we got here,” she said.

The goal, according to the CEO’s words, is to build a “more agile and efficient” company, in a year marked by the company’s decline. It is that, at the beginning of 2022, Facebook lost users for the first time, while the Metaverse that Zuckerberg had announced with great fanfare did not start.

It also went through seven months without profits in September, which deepened its decline on the stock: It has lost more than 70% on the Nasdaq since the start of 2022.