Posts Tagged id theft

By Bob Sullivan, The Red Tape Chronicles 

Bryan Rutberg’s daughter was among the first to notice something odd about her dad’s Facebook page.
At about 8 p.m. on Jan. 21, she ran into his bedroom and asked why he’d changed his status to: “BRYAN IS IN URGENT NEED OF HELP!!!”

Rutberg initially thought little of it, and lay down for an after-dinner nap. But an hour later, when his wife woke him to ask what was wrong, he took a second look and realized his Facebook account had been hacked. Within minutes, his cell phone was ringing non-stop, with concerned friends calling to offer help. Many had received an e-mail with the story that Rutberg had been robbed at gunpoint while traveling in the United Kingdom, and needed money to get home. One even sent $1,200 to a Western Union branch in London.

The Seattle resident and Microsoft employee then spent the next 24 hours in a frantic search for a way to contact Facebook and stop the hackers. But he was locked out of his own account and locked into a Catch-22; criminals had changed his login credentials so he couldn’t access his own Facebook page. That meant he couldn’t remove the dire status message. He tried to use his wife’s account to put a message on his “wall” indicating he was fine, but the scammer had “de-friended,” his wife, so that didn’t work. And he had no outside-of-Facebook way to contact many of his friends. Before he succeeded in getting his account deactivated, a friend’s impulsive generosity had cost him big-time, and Rutberg was left wondering how carefully Facebook protects its users from these kinds of crimes.

“It was all over by Thursday (the next day) but not without a hell of a lot of drama,” Rutberg said. By then, friends had filled up his cell phone with text messages of concern, sent endless e-mails, and one even called Microsoft to warn the firm that an employee was in trouble.

Rutberg was the victim of a new, targeted version of a very old scam — the “Nigerian,” or “419,” ploy. The first reports of such scams emerged back in November, part of a new trend in the computer underground — rather than sending out millions of spam messages in the hopes of trapping a tiny fractions of recipients, Web criminals are getting much more personal in their attacks, using social networking sites and other databases to make their story lines much more believable.

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