Facebook user records for 533 million users are being offered for free on online hacking forums, several sources report.

If there is any good news in this situation, it is that the data is old and has been available to cybercriminals for at least two years. Facebook said in a statement to The Record and Bleeping Computer that it was all scraped data, copied without Facebook's permission from Facebook's website before the loophole was closed in 2019.

We have reported on this same data stash, or parts of it, three times in the past.

The bad news is that this data includes full names, email addresses, cell phone numbers, and sometimes birth dates. Spammers and scammers can use the information to target people with personalized emails and text messages.

Data is anchored to phone numbers. Facebook used to have a feature where if you entered a phone number, you would see a link to the Facebook account associated with that number.

What could go wrong? Soon someone will be tampering with computers, generating phone numbers in a valid format, throwing them at Facebook, and harvesting the resulting list of accounts and all their publicly available details. (This could be legal.)

At the end you would have a reverse phone book with hundreds of millions of entries. This is what is currently offered online.

Even if you have a Facebook account, that doesn't mean your data is in this stash. The person providing this data claims to have already broken it down into batches by country. The U.S. has about 32.3 million accounts, and Canada has about 3.5 million. While this is a very large number of users, it is a small fraction of the estimated 258 million Americans and Canadians who use Facebook.

Only those who gave Facebook their phone numbers are included, and even then, you may not be one of them.

Given that the Facebook app for Android and iPhone tries to get your phone number and the phone numbers of all your contacts as soon as you install the app, Facebook probably has over 36 million North American phone numbers.

So what can be done about this? Beware of irregular emails, texts, instant messages, and social media posts that promise get-rich-quick schemes or rewards, or that tell you that you need to act urgently to avoid paying previously unknown fines or fees.

Windows 10 antivirus software and Mac antivirus software will rule out scams on your computer; if you use an iPhone, keep your wits about you when responding to emails, texts, and messages.