just had a really interesting time on Facebook. this involves a fake friend request, but with an interesting twist I hadn't seen before and which damn nearly fooled me. Story:
Just been dealing with a convincing spammer who went under the name of Stella Grant. This looks like a new scamming technique: a friend request comes up. You check them out and notice you have six or seven mutual friends. You think "Okay. We move in the same circles." As everything else checked out pretty much, I accepted the friend request. We talked for a while on Messenger. I gave her a few very general things about me (male, happily cohabiting, not looking for anyone new, no kids, ocassional uncle); she was very vague about herself.
Had a growing feeling things were not right and as the conversation progressed, withheld further personal information. She was vague about herself. She claimed to be in Dayton Ohio and that it was morning there; I checked relative time compared to the UK and got that it would have been late afternoon in Ohio at that time, maybe six-seven hours behind the UK. . (Where it would be morning in relation to Britain at that time would be out in the Far East).
Who gets the time of day completely wrong for where they live? All you need to do is glance at a clock or watch or the onscreen clock. The information disclosed about herself in the conversation also did not not feel right and almost contradicted itself in places. She explained about relatives but was very impersonal and did not name them.
She'd put up photos of a pleasant looking woman in her forties. I wondered why the pictures were mirror-reversed. The pictures were vaguely familiar from somewhere. An image search said the photos matched a porn actress called Tanya Tate.
(FT forums readers might recall that I discussed Tanya on the forum, having seen a little of her on YouTube: the idea of a Scouse porn star was well, strange and exotic. You expect porn to have California Valley accents, not Wavertree or Toxteth. I like Liverpool people, I'm more or less married to one, but Scouse as an accent for eroticism of any kind? Explained why her face is familiar enough for me to think "seen her somewhere before" )
By now Stella was asking me for photos of myself and I'm thinking "this is an all-time first for FB. Nobody's ever asked for photos of me before and is this normal on first speaking to somebody else?" Things simply did not add up or feel right.
I checked the FB pages for the six or seven mutual friends her FB page claimed we had. Guess what... none of them had Stella listed on their pages as an FB friend. Stella seems very vague on them all. (dodged simple questions like "how did you get to know L**** G***?")
Realisation - I'm being scammed. She wants the photos for purposes of identity theft. She has my name and location and a few random general things about me. Cut the conversation and got out. Unfriended/blocked her.
What took me in was that we apparently had seven mutual friends. So the thought was - evidently, she's on one of the politics/religion groups I'm in ( person X for instance, has thousands of people who read his thoughts on the socio-political scene, so she might have been part of a discussion forum there).
While holding her on Messenger, I went through the friends list of those "mutual friends" to discover she doesn't appear there. So this new development in scamming evidently means they've found a way to fake a friends list on their FB page - probably by harvesting genuine FB friends of the target and working random names into a Friends profile to make it look more convincing. I've never seen that one before, and it was horribly convincing.
Also, one of her first questions was to confirm my geographical location ("Manchester" is both accurate and extremely vague). I wonder if she was acting on the assumption that British people are not clued up on the USA? I know where Ohio is. I also know her claimed birthplace of Missouri is a long way south. Not damning in itself - people do move homes within the USA as indeed anywhere. I live in Manchester but have previously been in North Wales and East Anglia.
Her liked pages included a random local fire department in New Jersey, which is nowhere near either Ohio or Missouri. And I asked a question about Dayton Ohio - "is this the place with the motorcycle racing"? when she said "yes", that was a red flag - to the best of my knowledge, that's Daytona. Which is in Florida. So.... goodbye, Stella, very nice try.
