It was one of those things. I happened to be on the phone with a friend yesterday, when at the same time, I got a Facebook message from him.
It was one of those things that just did not seem like him at all. It was something about some government grant program which could provide me loads of extra cash. I would imagine that in order to cash in I would have to provide this person with my banking information or something along those lines.
But since I was on the phone with this person, I asked if he was sending me something about a grant program. The answer was no. So I told him he might want to report that his account had been cloned and also make sure his privacy settings were ramped up.
Apparently, a lot of this type of things comes down to one thing. People can see out friends lists on Facebook. You have to poke around in the privacy settings to change this, but it can be changed. Why it isn’t that way by default is beyond me. But you have to make the effort to make sure that door is firmly closed.
These scammers obviously know this, and with the number of people you see having this done to them, they must be making a profit from it, or they wouldn’t continue. They would probably switch to something like calling and telling you there was something wrong with your Windows or some other scheme to separate us from our money.
Cloning Facebook accounts seems to be a thing these days. I had it done to me not too long ago. It was reported, the people doing it moved on to someone else as soon as it was reported, because that’s what they do, and I looked a bit closer at my privacy settings.
On the advice of a friend, I was told to specifically look for the part about your friends list not being available to others. So I made sure that was done. After a look through, I made sure I kept everything I could locked down as tight as possible. But that doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, somehow, won’t figure out a way to get past all this.
It would make sense for the default settings on our accounts to be the tightest security possible, but that doesn’t seem to be much of a concern to social media platforms. It is left up to us to keep a check on them.
So you might want to take a look at yours. There seems to be a lot of this going on lately. If we all try to keep things locked up as tight as possible, these criminals will have to find some other way of reaching into out pockets.
They might even have to go back to writing emails from a Nigerian prince. By the way, a former university roommate of mine was an actual Nigerian prince. I wrote back to many of these people over the years. None of them seemed to know him. You wouldn’t think there would be that many Nigerian princes.
Something tells me they might not have been telling me the truth.
