Toronto Police believe the city elite – CEO’s and wealthy entrepreneurs – are having their identities cloned by criminals who are using Linkedin and similar social networking sites to find their victims.
According to a report in today’s Toronto Sun:
Toronto Police fraud officers said several “high profile” members of the city’s business elite have been defrauded recently after their information were stolen and used to create identities to obtain credit cards or services to accumulate cash or credit.
Insp. Bryce Evans, of the force’s financial crimes unit, said he couldn’t reveal names of the “high profile” Torontonians who were allegedly scammed due to ongoing probes.
He said the investigations requires time and resources since the high-tech crooks are usually in other countries and use a range of false addresses.
“Some people are posting way too much personal information on websites,” Evans said on Thursday. “Thieves are stealing this information to create identities and commit fraud.”
Toronto Det. Alan Spratt said some thieves use Linkedin data and a photograph from another person to create identities, which are used to befriend others online before scamming them for cash.
“People should always verify independently what they are told on the Internet,” Spratt said on Friday. “Never accept what people say and verify information yourself.”
Joe says: Whether a CEO or a 14 year old high school kid, you should always be careful about what personal information you put on social networking sites such as Linkedin and Facebook.
Take a look on Facebook and you can quickly find people who have their personal info open for anyone to see. Info like name, when its their birthday, where they live, school they attend or place they work. All this could easily be used by a criminal to clone their identity. How hard do you think it would be for a criminal to find out where you live if he had your name, photo and the name of your school or place of employment?
Go log in to your Facebook account and any other social networking sites you use right now and make sure privacy settings are set to ‘only show my personal info to my friends’ (or similar depending on the network).
Don’t think that will make your personal information secure though. Although it will keep out casual browsers, any determined criminal won’t be put off by something as trivial as a privacy setting. Facebook has been coming under fire for security breaches and breaking various privacy laws around the world for years and it has long been known to be vulnerable to hackers.
“On July 28, 2010 the BBC reported that security consultant Ron Bowes used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles to collect data of 100 million profiles. The data collected was not hidden by the user’s privacy settings. Bowes then published the list online. This list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, their name and unique ID.” Source: Wikipedia
Just one of the many reasons you won’t find me on Facebook.
