From Andymorton.org – New Facebook Scam Tactic
February 15, 2011 Leave a comment
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By Andy | February 14, 2011
This may already be documented and I’m not aware of it, but I had my first encounter with a new form of a Facebook scam this weekend. On Friday evening I received a friend request from an acquaintance from college. I immediately thought it was odd because we were already friends, but then wondered if she was “starting over” with Facebook. It’s not uncommon to hear of users wiping out all of their friends and rebuilding from scratch. So without much further thought I accepted. Then at 3:24 a.m. this morning the following message comes through:
Hello,How r u doin 2day? Hpe evryone is ok? nt sure u’ve hrd d good news about Officer Michael who work for department of compensation?
Pretty phishy, huh? After reading the above message I realized someone had created a fake profile using her credentials. I double checked my friends list and found that I was indeed friends with the same person, twice. What’s disconcerting is the time and effort it took to build the profile. They copied her profile picture, “liked” all of the same interests and went as so far as to list her hometown and current city of residence. Finally they started sending out friend requests to all of the people connected to the real account. Fortunately other people have caught on and posted alerts to the real account’s wall. I also emailed and alerted her to the Block/Report feature which lets you report fake accounts.
Is this the future of online phishing and spam? If so, it may become as prolific as the trash we receive by email and see on other social networks. Protect your accounts people!
