SCAMMERS CHANGE: FACEBOOK RED FLAGS

You all have friends and family in your Facebook Friends List, right?

We all like to change things up a bit from time to time too, right?

Scammers change their profiles in unusual ways that can help you identify them as a scammer.

Real people change jobs and profile photos, add timeline posts and simply go about living their lives. Scammers don’t have a life because the profile is a fake, so when they change them it is usually because the are changing core parts of their fake identity.

For example here are a few changes to watch for:

• Sex Change: the scammer started as one sex then changes their profile photos to a different sex. Very common.
• Locations: they change their location. Now people make mistakes and fix them, but scammers must have StarTrek transporters because the just show up in distant places without using facebook to report a move. They also tend to erase older locations.
• Jobs & Employers: A scammer may start with one normal sounding job, then they work for Facebook or some other improbable company but from Africa. Changing jobs is not unusual, but people tend to record their employment history too.
• Friends: They now have a lot of same sex friends. Maybe when they connected with you they didn’t have any friends, but now a man has dozens of women friends only or vice versa.
• Relationships: you are talking with some one that wants a relationship with you but all of a sudden their profile says in a relationship or engaged – not to you!
• Especially Name: Now this is trickier because Facebook is such as pain about names. You can have a name forever and then Facebook questions it, and may not let you keep it as is. This happened with one of our team today. But a radically different name is another hint they might be a scammer.

The thing to look for are profiles that are changing in your friends list.

Best of luck!

John Hull
RSN Team