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Nigerian Scammers Need Friends Too
It seems that no place is sacred when it comes to the notorious Nigerian email scammers, as now it appears they have infilitrated Facebook with their fraud tactics.
Normally in Facebook you only receive emails from friends, but social networks are being targeted more and more by scammers, and the Nigerian email scam is just one more reason why you need to be careful with whom you accept as friend. Not only that, Facebook accounts can be compromised, and your information can be taken and stored, shared and spread around the Net quicker than it takes to type LOL.
These virtual con artists are also posing as your friends. One Facebook friend reported that their friend’s mother asked them to send $2,000 to the UK to pay for an emergency flight because her credit cards had been frozen. While the friend was ready to help a friend in need, she first decided to call the woman in England first to get more information, only to find out that there was no flight emergency. The mother’s Facebook account had been compromised and the scammer had sent messages to the entire friends list trying to get money.
People are vulnerable enough on the Internet as it is, but with more and more fraud and illicit activities becoming prevalent, you don’t even know if you can trust your Facebook friends anymore, if they really are your friends.
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.
