Thursday, August 28, 2014

THE INTERNET: Heads up! Your Facebook page can be hacked

I've struck up a friendship with a delightful woman at the Y -- she is amusing but takes her workout seriously -- and so I found her on Facebook a few weeks ago and sent a "friend" request. It was quickly accepted. But then I got an online message purporting to be from her, claiming she was critically ill in the hospital in London and needed me to send her money because her family had abandoned her.
Well, I knew that was rubbish: she'd been at the gym the evening before and had put me to shame with the quality and quantity of her pushups.
I emailed her to alert her to this, and that's how she discovered that her Facebook page had been hacked. She had to jump through many hoops to get it back in her own name, and she said she's been getting some scam phone calls that she thinks are related to the incident. For instance, her phone company called her supposedly to conduct a customer service survey -- and then the final question was, "What's your Social Security Number?"

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