Facebook has become a favourite meeting place for people to keep in touch with
friends on-line. As a result, millions of people (both young and old) are on Facebook,
so much so that if you are not on Facebook it’s like you don’t belong to the modern
tech-savvy society!
In recent times however Facebook has also become a favourite hunting ground for
internet hackers resulting in people with malicious intent searching for their victims
within the Facebook network.
The net result is that Facebook related crimes are on the increase. Identity theft is the
most common crime on Facebook. This is where hackers create a fake profile after
stealing your information from the internet and pretend to be you.
Hackers use a number of different techniques to make money out of Facebook using
stolen information. The following is an actual scenario that happened recently to an
unsuspecting Facebook user;
Sugath is a teenager and an ardent fan of Facebook. One day when he logged in to his
Facebook account he noticed that there was a “friend” request from an attractive girl by the
name of Kavindra who had a set of nice photos on her profile. Sugath did exactly what any
teenager would do and accepted the invitation.
He then got a chat request from Kavindra. Sugath was exited and was blind to the obvious
and started chatting. At some point during the chat Kavindra wanted to have a video chat
and sent a link (or URL), for Sugath to click and start the video chat. Eager to see the
attractive Kavindra ‘live’ on screen, Sugath proceeded to login using the link sent by this
unknown female. The link took Sugath to his Gmail account login page. He tried to login to
the site with his Gmail username and password and got an error message, asking him to try
again. He immediately conveyed this to Kavindra. She said that there seems to be an issue
and concluded the chat session promising a video chat at a later date. Sugath was exited and
was dreaming of chatting with her again.
But when Sugath woke up the next morning he realized that he was in big trouble, when he
could not login to either his Facebook account or his Gmail account. He was horrified when
he realized that the last time he used his Gmail credentials on-line was to access the Video
Chat URL with Kavindra. It dawned on him very quickly that he had been duped by the
attractive Kavindra. He soon received a call from a Facebook friend to say that there was a
post saying “if you want your account password contact Naveen via Skype” in his Facebook
wall. When Sugath contacted that person over Skype he demanded money in exchange for his
password and that the payment should be made on-line …. And it was a substantial amount
of money!
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