Hyderabad: The next time you get a request from a ‘friend’ on Facebook, beware of the familiar face you’ve known as crooks have adopted a new method of conning on social media. They are simply downloading a couple of pictures, creating a fake ID and sending messages to known friends and asking for money due to an ‘emergency’.
Cyber Crime officials said that most of the profiles had an option to message without adding as a friend which makes it less suspicious to the user to doubt the text with a photo of someone familiar.
Unlike the usual modus operandi used by scamsters, the new hack does not require them to vet your profile or build a rapport before the con, said a senior official from the Rachakonda Cyber Cell.
“The victim’s profile is selected based on the likes and activity with that of the person whose ID they would be mirroring. Only the ones frequently liking posts and commenting on them are targeted through the fake ID, since they are more likely to respond immediately,” said the official.
Explaining further, an official from the Hyderabad Cyber Crimes said that though this was not a foolproof scam, people did fall prey to this, believing the messages that their friend was in trouble. “Fortunately, some of them make a call and ask about their alleged ‘accident’ whereas others blindly transfer funds. We cannot blame them for that, as the scamster creates an emergency situation for the victim and even messages with texts saying that he had damaged his mobile phone in the crash and urgently needed cash for treatment,” he said. Avinash Sharma, a techie from Hyderabad, had his Facebook profile mirrored and his friends were contacted by the scamster, who conned them to the tune of '10,000 from different victims.
“I woke up puzzled to the frantic calls from my friends asking about my well being. When they told me about getting a message from me asking for money, I asked them to share the profile’s link and put it up on my status everywhere and warned my friends not to reply. The said profile, was however, blocked within a few hours,” Sharma said.
While Facebook’s picture guard and watermark are not foolproof, they could well reduce identity theft and give Indian social media users some additional peace of mind.
Social media companies could do more to build protections against photo stealing into their platforms, and make users aware of the available tools, said Chand Pasha, cyber crimes inspector of Social Media and Hacking Unit.
