Ethan Baron
Province
Dave Shortt (left) and friend Eli Puterman surf the web at the Waves coffee shop on Hastings Street in Vancouver yesterday. Shortt said he probably isn’t careful enough about protecting his privacy online. Ric Ernst – The Province
Your social-networking site could be an open invitation to identity thieves, an online expert warned Tuesday in Vancouver.
Identity thieves and other cyber-criminals can pluck valuable nuggets of information from Facebook pages, tricking people into providing profile access, fraud investigator Jean-Francoise Legault told the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners conference.
Another social-networking site, MySpace, and the business-networking site LinkedIn, offer up similar bounties to fraudsters.
“We’re getting more and more people on-line,” Legault said. “Most people don’t realize the risks.”
Getting access to social-networking profiles – which often contain information such as birthdate, workplace, hometown, phone number and e-mail address – can be as easy as posing as the friend of a friend who’s listed on a personal page, Legault said.
People accepted as friends can see the profiles that contain personal information.
“Take a beautiful blond’s picture in a bathing suit and send it to a guy,” Legault said. “What do you think is going to happen? Accept! Accept! Accept!”
Even limited Facebook profiles available to anyone online often contain information about where a person lives, where they go to school, when they graduated, and where family members live.
In a two-minute check of one interview subject’s limited Facebook profile yesterday, The Province found out where they went to school, names, locations and pictures of family members, and names, locations, pictures and schools of hundreds of friends.
Vancouver police have not received reports about identity theft related to social-networking sites, but “it could become a problem,” said spokesman Const. Tim Fanning.
Criminals can take bits of personal information and build up enough to obtain documentation that can be used to obtain credit cards, Fanning said.
Charlotte Bell-Irving, a 20-year-old from Victoria, said she has about 700 Facebook friends and doesn’t worry too much that her personal information could fall into the wrong hands. “I should probably fix some of my security settings,” she said.
At Waves Coffee in downtown Vancouver, laptop user Dave Shortt, 33, admitted he probably does “not take enough” precautions to protect personal information.
“I pretty much set privacy settings, so that only people I know can access my information,” said Eli Puterman, 34, a University of B.C. PhD student. “I usually check to see who they are, if I’ve ever seen them before, how many friends they have. And if they only have one friend it means that they’re a fake.
“I think I got that beautiful blond picture last week. It was a blond woman who wanted me to be her friend. She had one other friend, so I sent my friend a message, saying, ‘Do you know this person?’ He said no so I deleted her because I think it was a spam or something.”
