See a Facebook scam in action

This caught my interest today.

Rakesh Agrawal, the CEO of SnapStream, a Texan software company, received a message on Facebook, supposedly from one of his friends – Matt Finkelstein. “Matt” told Rakesh that he was stranded in London, after he had his money and air tickets stolen and needed $800 to get home.

Fortunately, as you’ll see in the transcript Rakesh published on his blog, he was suspicious and guessed that his friend’s account had been broken into by a hacker.

Asking personal questions that only Matt or a close friend would know helped Rakesh uncover the truth, although it’s clear that the scammer was able to derive some information (for instance, his wife’s name) from the profile.

7:20am Matt
hi
whats up?

7:20am Rakesh
Hi Matt
Everything OK?

7:21am Matt
well,im really stuck…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.