Latest Expert Witness News

Facebook users prey for fraudsters, experts say

When you log on to Facebook, your new friend could turn out to be your worst enemy, an online crime expert reports. Identity thieves and other cyber-criminals can pluck valuable nuggets of information from Facebook pages, tricking people into providing profile access, said Jean-Francoise Legault, a fraud investigator for the consulting firm Deloitte.

Another social-networking site, MySpace, and the business-networking site LinkedIn, offer up similar bounties to fraudsters, Legault said at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners conference.

"We're getting more and more people online," Legault said. "Most people don't realize the risks."

Getting access to social-networking profiles - which often contain information such as birth date, workplace, hometown, phone number and e-mail address - can be as easy as posing as the friend of a friend who's listed on a personal page, Legault said.

People accepted as friends can see the profiles that contain personal information.

"Take a beautiful blonde's picture in a bathing suit and send it to a guy," Legault said. "What do you think is going to happen? Accept! Accept! Accept!"

Even limited Facebook profiles available to anyone online often contain information about where a person lives, where they go to school, when they graduated, and where family members live.

Vancouver police have not received reports about identity theft related to social-networking sites, but "it could become a problem," said spokesman Const. Tim Fanning.

Criminals can take bits of personal information and build up enough to obtain documentation that can be used to obtain credit card

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