My private Facebook messages have been leaked. What can I do?

Meaghan asks:

Hi,

I really need help, Someone has hacked into my facebook account. Someone that I know and is close to my family, He has sent messages back and forth from my email to his.He had the messages deleted from my inbox but then he sent me the conversation threatening he would tell my boyfriend. Is there anyways of deleting the message in his inbox. If I deleted my account would they delete from his end as well. Or even a way to hack into his and delete it from that end. I really need help as my boyfriend dont like him and the messages look real!!!!!

Response:

Hi Meaghan,

First of all, make sure you follow https://www.facebook.com/hacked to secure your Facebook account.

I assume with these messages that you don’t want your boyfriend to read are true, so you can either admit it, or tell them they are fake. For example, if you tell him they are fake, you can’t prove that they are or not because the other person could have modified it (when he copied it), and they are already deleted from your inbox. So there is no way to verify whether they are real or not. However, this only works if the messages where copy and pasted across, and not if the person used the forward feature in Facebook Messages.

Unfortunately, if you delete your Facebook account, private Facebook messages don’t get deleted in the other person account. Even if this was true, they could have had the messages sent to his email account or printed the messages out.

You could try hacking into his account using Facebook’s Forgotten password feature, if you know enough about the person.

When you write things on Facebook, always think “what will happen if this message is made public” or “do I want my mum to read this”, so things like this won’t happen again because you have nothing to hide.

You also might be interested in reading this: https://www.jackcola.org/2013/06/how-can-i-protect-myself-online/

Let me know how the situation pans out.

Regards,

Jack