1. Don't befriend your sketchy neighbor on Facebook. A man in the UK exploited the lame state of security questions to hack into his neighbors' bank accounts and steal from them. Iain Wood, 33, figured out friends and neighbors' bank account usernames -- perhaps the same as their email addresses? -- and then claimed to have forgotten the password. The banks asked security questions -- you know these: what's your pet's name? what's your best friend's name? what street do you live on? -- and Wood was able to answer them based on information he had dug up from their social networking accounts. He then broke into the accounts to get direct access to their money. His scheme was a bit more elaborate than that of the 23-year-old Californian who broke into women's email accounts to try to find nude photos of them. Wood says he would spend up to 18 hours a day going through people's profiles to find the information he needed to crack their accounts, reports the Telegraph. He stole over $55,000 over two years.
Remember, it's okay to defriend someone if they seem like the hacking type. And don't post information about your mother's maiden name if you can help it. Moving forward, for many of us, "social engineering hacking" may be a bigger concern than the more tech-savvy variety.
2. Don't make your Facebook events open to anyone who wants to come. New Yorkers, be aware that the NYPD have started patrolling the mean streets of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. A new unit in the Community Affairs Bureau will "mine social media, looking for info about troublesome house parties, gang showdowns and other potential mayhem," according to the New York Daily News. The police commissioner has specifically asked officers to keep track of parties that are advertised online, as they could get out of hand should they go viral. So party carefully, folks.
3. If you go on a looting spree during a week of riots, don't post the bounty in a photo on Facebook. That's what this dude did in London. It's wise that cops are getting on the digital beat, because crooks are often pretty revealing online. Even if your privacy settings are high enough that digital detectives can't see your booty, your crime-hating friends might rat you out. A 23-year-old Arizonan was charged with burglary this month after he robbed a fire department. He got burned by a Facebook friend, who called the police after he posted a photo of himself wearing a stolen fireman's helmet.
4. Finally, don't kid around about wanting to hire a hitman to kill somebody, because they could actually end up dead. We mentioned the case of London Eley as a previous folly. Eley, 20, posted a Facebook status message about being willing to "pay a stack" to someone to "kill her baby daddy." Timothy Bynum said he would take her up on the offer asking, "where he be at" and saying "i need that stack first." The baby daddy, Corey White, alerted police who arrested and charged Bynum and Eley. They went before a judge on Monday, who upheld the charges against them. Hours later, White was shot and killed. Though Eley and Bynum both said that they were not serious about their postings -- and were both in jail at the time of the shooting -- their prosecutions for murder solicitation and murder conspiracy, respectively, surely aren't helped by this.
Here is some more practical advice on "Facebook don'ts" via All Facebook: 7 Stupidest Mistakes We Keep Seeing on Facebook.
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