By now, many, if not all, people are likely to be leery of text messages or voicemails claiming to be a friend or relative in great financial distress and needing you to send them money.
But criminals, adapting creatively, have added a new element: they can superimpose a picture of you next to a hospital patient in a bed, and then start posting as you on Facebook — about how ill your relative is and how sad it all is. Then they start posting items for sale that “you” claim your poor sick relative is selling to pay for medical care. Would you buy something a friend’s loved one was selling to raise money for their medical care? Admit — you might, right?
Read this example reported by News6. In this case, the victim’s friends lost $8,000.00 trying to help a friend. But it wasn’t their friend posting that. Their friend had been locked out of her Facebook account and a criminal had taken it over.
You can’t stop someone from taking a photo you’ve posted publicly and manipulating it to make it look like you are next to someone in a hospital bed. But what you can do is take steps to secure your Facebook and other social media accounts by using strong passwords changed periodically and multifactor authentication (MFA)
