Yesterday, I received the following Facebook message:
I posted this to my Facebook wall when I received it, and it was interesting to hear from several people who felt they might have been fooled had they received the same message. After nearly a decade of becoming familiar with the tricks of these scammers, I question just about every angle. While this was the first time that I have received a message like this, the motive for the message seemed obvious to me. A photo of me that verifies the date would make it possible for a scammer to “prove” they were really me (rather than just using old photos). As well, if I had Googled the name of the sender (like my colleague Katia did), I might have wondered how this famous Nigerian business woman had the time to message me personally (and perhaps even why she cared about a mere 150K).
Today, I was contacted by another person on Facebook who had heard from her friends that a profile with her name, photos, and identifying information was trying to friend many of them. Several reported this to be suspicious so she immediately warned her friends with a status update. I asked her where the fake profile was and she found it for me. What we noticed was really sneaky (and horrible).
See below, the real person’s profile:
Now, look at the fake profile:
Do you see the important difference? The profile and header photos are the same in each. The friend count is certainly different. But the big thing is the spelling of the name. The authentic profile is “Joy Brennan” (two ‘n’s) and the fake profile photo is “Joy Brenan” (one ‘n’). The especially sneaky part is that if you were to try and search for fake Facebook profiles with your photos and name, this would make these much more difficult to find.
So why would the scammers do something like this? My guess is that they were hoping to perform a scam such as the common “email hijack,” where members of an existing friends/family network could eventually be tricked into sending money due to a contrived distress call (e.g., I was robbed while traveling, please wire me money).
So there you have it -Â a couple more scams to be concerned about. Oh, and Facebook still isn’t doing anything about these problems.