Facebook launches investigation after Bulgarian blogger buys 1.1 million email addresses for $5
Earlier this month Bogomil Shopov, a Bulgarian blogger and digital rights activist, bought 1.1 million Facebook names, user IDs, and emails posted to the social marketing site Gigbucks.
Gigbucks is a ‘digital odd-jobs’ board where users offer to perform tasks in exchange for payments.
Shopov claims he bought the information from a user called ‘Mertem’.
Mertem wrote in the sales description: “The information in this list has been collected through our Facebook apps and consists only of active Facebook users, mostly from the US, Canada, UK and Europe.”
Shopov then wrote on his blog: “I just bought more than 1 million… Facebook data entries. OMG!”
Following his second post on the purchase, Shopov claims a Facebook 'policy team' contacted him saying: ”'We would like you to send us this file, delete it, tell us if you have given a copy of it to someone, give us the website from which you bought it including all transactions with it and the payment system and remove a couple of things from your blog.”
Facebook spokesman later added: 'Facebook is vigilant about protecting our users from those who would try to expose any form of user information. In this case, it appears someone has attempted to scrape information from our site.
'We have dedicated security engineers and teams that look into and take aggressive action on reports just like these.
'We continue to investigate this specific individual.”