An online scammer is selling information gathered from 267 million Facebook profiles for as little as $600 on a "dark web" marketplace.

Judging from what was posted by Bleeping Computer and the Singaporean information security firm Cyble before being alerted, this data set is clearly not that valuable.

Most entries include the Facebook user's full name, phone number, and Facebook ID number. They may also include the user's email address, date of birth, gender, and place of birth (most data are for US residents), but not passwords.

More significantly, this is apparently the same Facebook user data set that was published (but not sold) online in December 2019.

This data is likely several years old, as it consists of what could have been legally "scraped" from Facebook before the social network tightened its access rules in mid-2018. This information does not appear to have been harvested in any kind of data breach.

Nonetheless, the names and phone numbers are useful to telemarketers, robocallers, and scammers.

Records containing birth dates are valuable to identity thieves. However, it is unclear how many of the 267 million records contain birth dates.

Unfortunately, there is not much you can do about this now. Names and phone numbers are not secret in most cases. You could sign up for the best identity theft protection service, but I'm not sure if doing so would help.

Cyble has purchased a copy of the database and added it to the AmIBreached.com website, but to find out if your name or e-mail address is involved in this data dump, you have to pay for the privilege. (Cyble is offering it free for three months.)

Site operator Troy Hunt is happy to see the data added to the free HaveIBeenPwned infringement search service as well, although he may need to consider adding a search by name option.

The best solution might be for Facebook to purchase a copy of the data set and notify each affected individual about the breach. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg could pay the $600 price in pennies.