Introducing the Advance Fee Fraud Loan Scam

I recently have seen a new scam hitting Facebook and my Inbox - the "Loan Scam".

How it works:

Example scam from Facebook

A random person on the Internet offers you a loan, over Facebook or Email. The loan offers extremely low rates, and promises that since it's not a bank, only a few documents are needed, and that they lend to anyone regardless of credit.

Once you express interest, you'll be asked to provide some basic information. They may or may not ask for information which can be used in identity theft, such as Social Security number, or bank account numbers.

Eventually, you'll be asked to pay some sort of "processing fee". In fact, you'll probably find yourself being requested one fee after another, until you finally realize that you're being scammed.

It's very unfortunate that this scam targets those who are already having financial difficulties - because it ends up making their situation even worse.

It's important to make your friends and family aware of these scams, so that they don't fall for one of these scams.

Facebook Graph Search and OSINT

Facebook Graph Search is one of the newest features of Facebook.  It allows you to data-mine every person and page on the entire social network.  You can get an introduction at this page.

It's not available for everyone yet...but you can sign up for early access if you'd like.  It is extremely powerful as an OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) tool.  A tumblr site called Acutal Facebook Graph Searches show some of the more interesting search results.

Default Facebook Privacy Settings Randomly Not Working

It has come to my attention that the default Facebook privacy settings are not properly functioning at seemingly random times.  Unfortunately you have no idea the settings aren't working correctly until after you post something...

Despite my default setting of "Friends Only", I've noticed multiple posts being available to everyone, as indicated by the globe icon below.

It may be worth checking your old posts to see who has access to them.  You may be surprised to find some of your posts were set to public.

I have posted about this issue on Facebook's support page, but expect little response.

One possible workaround to this issue is to go into your Facebook Privacy Settings, change your post privacy to public, then back to Friends Only.  This appears to have corrected the issue for me, for now.

If anyone else has encountered this issue, I encourage you to post a comment, and if you managed to fix it or not.

Facebook Location Sharing Enabled by Default - Another Threat to your Privacy and Safety

I noticed something disturbing today.  Ever since about the 15th of March (noticed this on some of my Friends posts going back to the 13th), my Facebook posts have started including my location.  That's pretty disturbing, because I never enabled Facebook to share my location.  It would seem Facebook has enabled this setting by default.

In fact, if I wanted everyone to know where I am, I would have typed my location in my Facebook post.

This really becomes problematic if I were to use Facebook while on vacation.  Suddenly my posts will tell everyone I'm not home, and depending on my privacy settings, that's pretty much telling the world "hey, he's on vacation, go steal stuff from his house!".

I've noticed most of my friends posts are including this information as well.

Facebook does provide instructions on disabling location sharing (https://www.facebook.com/about/location) but it's not very clear if these settings stick.

I urge you the next time you post on Facebook, check to see if there is a small gray box below your post which includes your approximate location.  If there is, click the X inside that box to disable location sharing.

Share this message with your friends and family on Facebook, and help them be safe online too!