Don’t we already know that we lay ourselves vulnerable with our online existence and constantly updated presence? It seems that this open vulnerability has been rearing its ugly head to the tune of thousands of dollars.
Jayne Scherrman was conned of ‘$4,000 by scammers who hacked into a Facebook page belonging to one of her friends.’ This is not the first time that we learn about such Facebook scams, in particular, and online identity theft, in general.
It all started when the log-in information of Scherrman’s friend, Grace Parry, got stolen. Then, the people on Parry’s friends list received ‘messages saying that she and her husband had been robbed in London and needed funds to get home.’
Scherrman did receive such messages and even ‘a call from a man with a British accent who said he was an immigration official.’ “He said the woman and her husband were being detained and that more money was needed to fly them home,” police spokesman Jason Selzer told the Press Association.
The messages must have seemed credible to Scherrman. Either that or she must be one of Parry’s closest friends because she was too concerned that ‘she sent three different wire transfers to London.’
In the meantime, Parry was trying to communicate to her friends the fact that her Facebook account had been hacked, and that she was locked out of her account.
The lesson to be learned is more for the conned woman as she was too trusting of a social networking site, and failed to verify the fraudulent messages she received. In fact, swindling does not only happen online.
We are either vulnerable or gullible. Sometimes, there’s just a thin dividing line between the two.
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