Pranksters are taking to social media to play tricks on their friends and a 'Facebook dead' prank is making it very easy.
Rusty Foster left his Peaks Island, Maine home for a relaxing vacation in Cancun with his wife. When he returned home and tried to log in to his Facebook account, he found out that he was dead, ABC reports.
When he tried to access his account, he received a message that said, "This account is in a special memorial state. If you have any questions or concerns, please visit the Help Center for further information."
When Foster found out about his death, he was locked out of his account, so he let his friends know about it on Twitter.
"Facebook thinks I'm dead. I'm tempted to just let it," then "Did you know that you can report any of your Facebook friends dead & Facebook will lock them out of their account with no evidence needed?" he tweeted.
One of his friends realized that it wouldn't be too hard to convince Facebook that his friend was dead. He simply accessed the "Memorialization Request" page and filled out a form. A link to an obituary is required but Facebook doesn't check the details as long as the name matches. His friend linked to an obituary of a man who was born in 1924 and died in 2011. The man lived in a different state from Foster.
Foster tried to contact Facebook but they wouldn't unlock his account. He had to contact BuzzFeed. The site wrote an article about killing off their editor John Herrman. Herrman reported the death and he had his account reactivated within an hour.
An hour later, Foster had his account back.
His account hadn't change much with the exception of friends playing around with his fake death. He became known as "Rusty, the Facebook zombie" and one friend wrote him mock-eulogies.
Foster believes the social media site should have a better way of handling death reports. He didn't receive any sort of email or notification saying that his account was locked and he didn't realize it until he tried to log in.
"There ought to be an email sent to the account's email address informing it that the account has been reported dead and providing a link or something to dispute the report before any action is taken," Foster told ABC.
ABC reached out to Facebook about the issue. They released a statement saying, "We have designed the memorialization process to be effective for grieving families and friends, while still providing precautions to protect against either erroneous or malicious efforts to memorialize the account of someone who is not deceased," the statement reads. "We also provide an appeals process for the rare instances in which accounts are mistakenly reported or inadvertently memorialized."
Foster did some research and found that he wasn't the only victim of the Facebook dead prank. He found stories about it dating back to 2009.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
