Can Someone Hack Your Snapchat By Adding You? – Yes! Here’s How!

There has been popular query among snapchat users: can someone hack your snapchat by adding you? This post will let you know how risky it could be to add someone as a friend in a spanchat. Moreover, precautions that you should always take care.

@snapchatsupport Hi, my Snapchat account got hacked and it has been locked. Please unlock it for me @snapchatsupport

— The Mizzyest Mizzy (@Mizzy15th) January 8, 2024

The increasing popularity of snapchat has made it the primary target for scammers, hackers and cybercriminals.

While this platform offers a high degree of security and privacy, some users have reported their account being hacked or got compromised when they added someone as a friend.

Is that really possible? Can someone hack your snapchat by adding you?

If so, what should you do? How can you get your hacked snapchat account back? Moreover, how to prevent your snapchat account from being hacked?

Everything has been discussed in this blog post.

What happens when you add someone on Snapchat?

Snapchat, just like other social media apps, it’s made to interact with friends and meet new people from all around the world.

When you add someone as a friend on snapchat, both of you can view each other’s stories, send and receive snaps, make streaks, and chat.

It might seem exciting to do your snapchat activities with your friends and make those scores higher but is it okay to add someone as friend in your snapchat?

As far as, the friend request isn’t from a scammer or an automated bot, it’s totally safe to add people as a friend.

Snapchat offer high quality security and privacy features, which is almost non-hackable until you click on some unecessary links, replies to phishing messages, and share your personal information with someone.

Moreover, in a recent study, snapchat users have reported that they are not able to access their accounts.

The most obvious reason could be, them adding unknown people to their friend list and this simple action putting their account’s privacy at risk.

Snapchat can access your contact list through your phone number, which is a gold for hackers to steel. Moreover, they can do several illegal activities with your personal contact details, photos, and gallery. 

Can someone hack your snapchat by adding you?

No, someone can not hack your snapchat by adding you until you do some mistakes from your end. Further, snapchat offers top-notch privacy to their users, which is not really possible to crack by hackers.

However, people with malicious intentions can definitely hack your account by pretending to be your friend or a known person.

For example, you might end up adding bots, or suspicious accounts into your friend list., risking your account privacy.

This simple action of yours can potentially risk your private data, getting it in the wrong hands.

Moreover, snapchat’s Quick Add feature that gives you recommendations to add friends based on mutual connections, can also be responsible to get your account hacked.

Hence, it is always recommended to add people you personally know or you can trust.

Why would a scammer want your snapchat?

There can be a lot of reasons why would a scammer want your snapchat, for example, blackmailing, illegal spying, to steal your personal information which includes your phone number, email, date of birth, passwords, your gallery images.

Moreover, they can impersonate you by sending fake or illegal messages to your friends. Further, they may try to steal personal information from your friends using your identity.

Worst case, they can blackmail you by getting access to your sensitive data, such as contact numbers, pictures, messages, etc.

There are endless ways to use your data by scammers.

What To Do If My Snapchat Account Is Being Hacked?

If you think or feel your snapchat account is being hacked or compromised, make sure you immideately change your password to a strong one. Next, log out of all devices wherever you’ve logged in your snapchat. Further, enable two factor authentication to add double layer of security and report the concern to snapchat.

Here’re the steps you should follow:

Change Password

If you think, your snapchat account has been hacked by adding someone as a friend, you should instantly change your password to a different one.

In order to keep your account safe and secure, we advise you to use a strong or unique combination of passwords.

Just make sure to not use your name or date of birth in your password which can easily be guessed by the hacker.

Here’s how you can change your password.

• Open the Snapchat app on your device.
• Instead of adding in your Snapchat account details to log in, just go to “Forget Password”.
• Select that you want to reset your password through Email or SMS.
• Soon, you will receive a verification code from Snapchat on your email or mobile number linked to your account.
• After you enter the verification code, press on “continue”.
• Create your password with the mix of alphabets, digits, uppercase, lowercase, and special characters.
• After entering the new password, select confirm and log in to your account.

Enabling Two-Factor Authentication

Enabling two-factor authentication can help you keep your snapchat account safe and secured. Everytime someone login to your account, you’ll receive a verification OTP.

To activate this feature, you need to link your number or email to your snapchat account.

To enable the Two-Factor Authentication, here’s what you need to do:

• Open the Snapchat App on your device.
• Tap on the profile settings in your account.
• Go through your settings and select “Two factor Authentication”.
• On the next screen , click “continue button”.
• Then select if you want “Text Verification” or “Authentication App”.
• Next, You will see some on-screen instructions, follow them to enable Two factor Authentication.

Log out of all Devices

When you realise your account is hacked or your device is lost/stolen, all your personal information and data are at risk.

In such cases, it’s alwasy clever to instantly log out of all devices by going to snapchat’s settings in tha app.

Here’s the steps you should follow:

• Open Snapchat on your device.
• Go through your settings and tap on two factor authentication.
• There you will find “Forget Devices”, select it.
• There you will see an “X” next to your devices, tap on it to make the devices forget.
• When you are done selecting the devices, confirm it by selecting “Yes”.

This will instantly log you out from all the devices wherever you’ve logged in your snapchat.

Report it to Snapchat

When you know that your Snapchat account is compromised or hacked, its important to report it to the official Snapchat website.

The first thing you can do is reach out to the Snapchat website, provide them with the email address.

A Snapchat representative will request you for additional information such as your username or when you started noticing these signs of getting hacked.

But remember that they will never ask you for your password.

After you gain access to your Snapchat account, change the password immediately with the help of steps mentioned above.

How Do I Know If My Snapchat Account Is Compromised?

There can be multiple ways to know if your snapchat account is being hacked or compromised. For example, if you receive some warning emails from snapchat stating your email address has been changed, or your account has been logged in from different device. Moreover, if you constantly have to re-login everytime you open the snapchat, it maybe a sign that someone else has access to your snapchat account.

Here’s the complete list of how you can know if you snapchat account is being hacked.

1: Constant re-authentication

If there are times when you are constantly asked to re-enter your login information or keep receiving emails that your account got logged in from an unknown device or if you keep getting logged out of your snapchat account, it’s possible that your account is being compromised.

If you see the message “Oops! We couldn’t find matching credentials”, this happens when Snapchat incorrect login credentials. Meaning, your ID & password might have been changed.

Moreover, it’s highly unusual for Snapchat to send you OTP messages/emails to authenticate your credentials everytime you open snapchat.

If this happens frequently, there are high chances that your account might be hacked.

2: Unusual Activity 

The most obvious sign of your account getting hacked is when your account shows activities which you did not perform or messages you don’t remember sending.

Further, hacker may start posting stuff which you do not know about. And, they can easily portray themselves as “you”.

They can easily gain access to your personal information or save your photos or videos without you knowing it.

If you take notice of such activities in your snapchat account, immediately take action by reporting it to official snapchat customer care service and changing your passwords.

3: Unknown Friends List

One of the first few signs to know that your account may be compromised is when you start noticing new or unknown people added to your friend list which you don’t remember adding yourself.

You should keep in mind that when you try to befriend someone on snapchat, you need to add their phone number. So, if you notice new or unfamiliar people in your friend list, its the hacker who might be doing this.

So, if you notice your friend list has increased with people you don’t remember adding, your account is most likely compromised. 

4: Snapchat warning mails and notifications

Like other social media platforms and websites, Snapchat sends warning mails and messages to let their users know about the changes made into their accounts.

Whenever the hacker is trying to get into your account, your phone number and email address are at potential risk since they are directly linked to your snapchat account.

So, if you’re frequently receiving that your password has been changed, or your phone number has been changed, it’s more likely that your account is being compromised.

Moreover, warning emals, such as “snapchat has been acced through new device” or smilar one could also be a sign.

Whenever you feel like something is weird or notice unusual text messages which you don’t remember sending, make sure you change your password and log out of all devices.

5: Spying with Spyware

One of the most widely used methods of hackers is installing spyware through your Snapchat account. They use that spyware to spy on you and your activities through Snapchat.

Spyware apps like mSpy, uMobix, etc. can stay hidden in your device after installation. They can record your activities, without you knowing it.

The hacker can view it, archive it, on your snapchat.

Most of the time, you won’t be able to tell if there’s spyware installed in your device as they work discreetly.

But there are time when you might notice unfamiliar apps and files in your device, over usage of data, strange text messages.

To protect your devices from these spywares, you can purchase spyware removal tools from well known brands like Kaspersky, Avast, Avira and scan your device every week.

6: Phishing

Phishing is a type of online scam where hackers pretend to be an official organisation to trick people to get personal information.

This leads to users getting their account hacked or compromised. On Snapchat, hackers pretend to be a popular brand, or influencers, offering people giveaways or promotion and then asking users to click on a suspicious link or share their personal information to participate.

Therefore, its important to be cautious of messages and requests you receive on Snapchat.

Never click on any suspicious link sent from unknown senders. Don’t enter any personal information on such websites.

7: Wireless Sniffer

Hackers use wireless sniffing method to eavesdrop on communication happening within the wireless network.

Public Wifi is convenient but risky to use when it comes to such situations where hackers can easily access the public wifi to steal your data and easily access your Snapchat account.

They use some special hardware and software tools to snatch the data as it is being transmitted over the wireless network. They decode that data into a readable format. 

To protect yourself from such hackers, we recommend you use Virtual Private Network(VPN) to protect your privacy. Some of the best preferred VPNs to use- Express VPN, Nord VPN, purevpn.

Conclusion

In this post, we discussed; can someone hack your snapchat by adding you?

No, it is not possible for any random person to hack your snapchat just by adding you as a friend. However, there can still be a chance to get your snapchat hacked or compromised.

Make sure you don’t add any random person to your snapchat as they can be attackers or suspicious bots, trying to capture your data.

Moreover, if you keep getting warning emails or messages from snapchat, or if you see unusual activities inside your snapchat account, probably your account has been hacked.

If you want to keep your Snapchat account protected from getting hacked then it’s better to avoid adding unknown people to your friend list.

Avoid clicking on any suspicious links and sharing over information to someone.

Hope all your questions were answered through this article.

Frequently Asked Questions(FAQs)