Nigerian scammers hit Facebook
Karina Wells, a Google employee in Australia, received a Facebook message from a friend on Friday saying he was stranded in Lagos, Nigeria and needed $500 for a plane ticket home. What made her suspicious was her Australian friend's use of American terms like "cell phone" instead of "mobile."
So, Wells pretended that she was going to send the money via Western Union and instead turned the case over to authorities, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
Other Facebook users might not be so wise. Such Nigerian scams are common over e-mail but not on Facebook where you are only supposed to receive e-mails from friends in your network, unless one of them has had their account compromised.
"E-mails from social-networking sites are much more likely to get into our e-mail accounts in the first place, since they don't have the obvious hints that botnet spam does (such as a known-bad sender IP address, or known-bad headers, or known-bad e-mail construction) causing them to be filtered out," Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos, writes on his blog.
"But this incident is going one step further," he continues. "We will no doubt see more electronic conmen using stolen Facebook identities to steal money directly from the innocent by posing as their online buddies, unless more people take greater care over securing their computers and personal data."
Basically, the message is don't trust any message just because it looks like it comes from a friend, and verify information before you do anything. Oh, and keep your own PC updated with the latest antivirus and firewall software and operating system updates.
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor. 
What is so hard about using common sense?
Be real, and read the article properly. This is not like an email purporting to be from someone you have never heard of which is the old fashioned email scam. In those cases it is very easy to tell that it is a scam and only the very foolish lose money in those cases. The ebay scams are much harder to detect because you expect the seller of goods to be a stranger, however identity theft is not part of the deal there.
Instead this is about stealing a real identity and then sending you a message that appears to come from a real friend that you have in facebook. That can be difficult to detect. There might be small things that raise suspicions such as unusual language or an unexpected location, but with existing friends most people are not automatically suspicious.
It is a very insidious form of fraud and very difficult to deal with due to the international nature of the fraudulent activity, but it is fraud and a very serious form of fraud that needs to be addressed seriously.
I requested Facebook to delete my personal data, they refused. Go to hell Facebook.
No, it's probably someone from Nigeria since they said to send the money to Lagos, Nigeria.
After that....
I've already had someone using "Quick Lagos" as the delivery address to scam my web site by using stolen credit card information to make a purchase. I turned all of the information I had on the transaction over to the authorities but these scam artists are very good at what they do and from what I was told, they're almost impossible to catch.
They use a chain of people to receive and deliver merchandise and each person along the chain only knows their job so they can't shed any light on the operation. They work from neighborhoods that are isolated by crime so anyone new penetrating it, is a red flag and are dealt with severly to test their mettle. The police are not tolerated either.
It's a shame. If they would use their brains and ingenuity to make money legitimately, they would probably do quite well.
- by aesculus09 November 12, 2009 5:03 AM PST
- report these guys to suspectedscammers.com. if the authorities can't do enough to stop it, we can self-police the internet and inform each other who these guys are.
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(19 Comments)visitors to suspected scammers.com can anonymously (and for free) submit email addresses of nigerian scammers as well as search through our database of previously reported scammers. no subscription or registration is required. please ardon the self-promotion, but we built this website as a public service for (hopefully) the benefit of the internet community.