By Pepper Parr
BURLINGTON, ON May 12, 2012 The email said I had recently changed my Facebook password. I didn’t change that password and the email message was not from Facebook – but it certainly looked that way.
The message I got, set out below, needs to be looked at carefully – the way you look at your bank statement.
Look at the address he email came from –
Facebook <confirm+pepper@beach.net>
that’s not Facebook. That’s a bunch of crooks on the other side of the world who want to steal my identity and with the bits and pieces they father they will create a profile of me and decide if I am worth trying to steal something from.
Read the address of the sender - that is not Facebook - that's someone pretending to be Facebook.
When these crooks succeed, and they succeed far more often than we realize, they do massive damage to the finances of the person they are attacking and sometime to the close to irreparable damage to reputations.
You can steer clear of much of this by being attentive – realize they’re out there and for them it costs next to nothing to send out electronic messages with the hope they will snag you.
The one thing the public needs is a place to send the attempts they get – the police are pretty good at tracking this kind of thing – but they need to know it is taking place. The more they know the faster they can act.
At some point we will have an international agency that can track, apprehend, arrest and punish these crooks.
But for now – when you learn something tell your friends. And pay attention.
