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Facebook Phishers Stealing Facebook Accounts

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Phacebook Phishers Phinding Ways To Steal Your Account

Phishing isn’t anything new to the Internet–it’s a sneaky way for scammers to trick you into giving up your information (names, passwords, account numbers), allowing them to snatch up your profiles, logins, and other personal accounts.

But what Facebook phishers are doing is finding ways to obtain your information, then selling the Facebook accounts to spammers, who will use the stolen accounts to promote illegal products, malware, and other illicit websites. They will spam the hell out of these accounts until they are suspended or banned, and then move on to the next one, without any regard for the original account holder.

While Facebook hackers might not be as dangerous as stealing your Paypal account or your bank account, still they have complete access to all of your personal information, which can then be used to apply for credit cards and other forms of fraudulent credit and identity theft.

While it might seem like an obvious cautionary warning, never give out your personal details to anyone, always use different passwords (and not easy-to-figure-out passwords at that) for different websites, and always verify that the page you are logging-in to is the actual website, and not some spoof of Facebook, Paypal, eBay, or other.

All it takes is one slip up for a Facebook hacker to snatch up all your details and use your account for spamming, scamming, or worse.

More News About Facebook Identity Theft

You don’t need to look very hard to find horror stories about Facebook identity theft. We already know how vulnverable your personal information can be, especially if it’s posted openly on your freely available profile page. It doesn’t take much for a poacher to put two and two together to get enough details (including your birthday) about you to use to apply for credit.

And it doesn’t even need to be a big credit purchase, or a fraudulent VISA or Mastercard. It’s fairly easy for a crook to assimilate your ID, and use it to rent movies from the video store, or sign out books from the library. While you might not be liable for anything charged against you or applied against your accounts, the inconvenience alone is enough to cause you a headache.

Again, the best thing you can do to protect yourself is to lock your Facebook profile so that only “trusted” friends can view your details. Even better, only put limited information in your account at all, so that poaching fraudsters can’t obtain enough information about you to use to create bogus credit cards, credit accounts, and other forms of identity theft.

It’s like parking your car at the mall. You know the thieves are out there and that they’re going to break into someone’s vehicle. The key is to make your vehicle look less attractive to steal than the other vehicles. While it’s likely going to be impossible to prevent someone from stealing information through Facebook, if your information is difficult to find, then they’ll just look somewhere else.

Facebook Is A Target For Scammers

Facebook Fraudsters Reach New Low

There was a very disappointing article in Canadian newspapers the other day where someone impersonated the sister of a murder victim in order to ingratiate themselves to sympathetic Facebook members.

The person pretended to be a grieving sibling in order to solicit money as part of a relief fund, hoping to get money out of Facebook members who were willing to help out. Thankfully, the scammer was discovered, and the impact was minimized, but the fact that people can use Facebook (or any other Internet medium) to impersonate others, grabbing readily-available information from personal profiles and other public web pages makes the Internet just a little bit more unsafe.

If you insist on putting a lot of personal information on your Facebook profile, ensure that your profile is protected, only available to your friends. Even then, don’t expect it to be private, as there are loopholes and other ways to access your details.

Certainly, before you open up your wallet, you should ensure that the money you intend to donate goes to the proper recipient, hopefully through a registered charity or organization, and not some online scumbag.