I just thought I'd let you know about a scam going on FB right now. It happened to a friend of mine yesterday, and a relative of theirs fell for the scam and wired $700 to the scammers.

I got an instant msg from this FB friend saying she was in England, N. London, and had been robbed at gunpoint. Supposedly, they had taken all their $$ and credit cards, and she needed $700 to change her tix to get home.

Alarms in my head started going off, so I emailed some of our friends that we had in common, just trying to verify that she was indeed in London. She wasn't-she was at work without access to a computer!

The scammers were online all day, on her account, deleting posts on her profile to warn her friends about the scam as fast as her friends could post them. They kept IMing me all day, too, asking how I planned to get them the money.

Just thought I would let you all know.

Thank for sharing this michellenj! I'll be sure to stay on my toes when I'm facebooking,,, that's just plain scary.

I think I would have called the police and let them arrange to meet the scammers with the proposed cash.

I reported it to Facebook, figuring that maybe they would want to keep the scammers online to try to see where they were. It's a shame that my friend's SIL fell for it.

That sucks!

I read about this happening to some other guy a couple of months ago. There was a big brouhaha about FB not allowing the victim access to his account to alert his FB friends and save them from being scammed.

I got that same message as an email once, from somebody who wasn't a friend, but instead somebody that I had provided tech support to through work once. I figured he must have just sent the message to everyone in his address book, never once thinking that maybe his account was hacked. Hmmmmm.

(It wasn't Facebook, just regular email.)

My friend says they think that they got into her account through a fake application that asked her to enter her password again.

I know that happened with YahooIM several years back. The way the scam worked was that you would get an IM from somebody that you have in your IM address list, saying that they had posted new pictures in their Yahoo pictures site (which they don't have any more, come to think of it!). The IM included a link that was supposed to be to Yahoo Pictures. When you clicked it, it looked exactly like the Yahoo Pictures log-in page. You would enter your User ID and Password, then get a message about an incorrect user ID or password. You would then be sent to the real Yahoo pictures page (without knowing it), where you could log in. In the meantime, the scammers had your Yahoo ID and Password. They then went into your account and changed the password and started using your account to continue the scam, and also no doubt to peruse your email for any confidential/financial information.