If recent headlines are any clue, Facebook fraudsters have duped “friends” worldwide, from soldiers serving abroad to the Notre Dame linebacker who got juked by a faux Facebooker.
Ben Goldman has the scoop.
Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame football linebacker, had the world’s attention. He had triumphed over the loss of both his grandmother and girlfriend, and was leading his team, despite his tragedies, to the national championships. It was a prepackaged made-for-TV movie script that would have made any producer salivate.
The only problem was that the girlfriend Manti Te’o claimed to be in love with never existed, and thus unraveled his entire story.
The tale didn’t end with the failed machinations of a desperate PR ploy. Manti Te’o continued to make headlines after revealing that he too was the victim of lies and deception; he claimed to have been duped by an elaborate hoax.
According to Te’o, he had never actually met his “girlfriend” in real life, instead communicating only through phones, text messages, email and a series of fake social media accounts, mostly Facebook.
The idea that someone could be fooled into a serious relationship with a fake online persona was in many ways harder to believe than the melodrama that Te’o had been feeding reporters, but his story is just one of an increasing number of cases where social media sites are being used to lure, trick, or harm hapless victims. This has raised a host of questions about the pitfalls of modern social media technology.
After all, if a famed football player could be tricked into an illusory love affair, how might others be duped by fake online identities?
Here are a few other examples taken from the past year of real-life people being tricked by fake identities in social media.
Sexy, Single, Taliban
Australian soldiers in Afghanistan now have to dodge more than incoming bullets—they must evade spurious incoming friend requests, too. According to an article in the Sunday Telegraph, the Taliban has taken to using Facebook as a tool to spy on Australian soldiers, luring them into revealing sensitive information by friending them with fake profiles of beautiful, buxom women.
The problem was apparently severe enough to be included in a federal government review of the Australian Defence Forces (ADF). The report warned soldiers of “media personnel and enemies [creating] fake profiles to gather information. For example, the Taliban have used pictures of attractive women as the front of their Facebook profiles and have befriended soldiers.”
While imagining the Taliban posing as sexy Western women borders on the comical, such internet espionage is not at all unusual in the age of modern warfare. Many countries (such as the United States) have been taking the threat seriously enough to offer social media training to their soldiers.
Data Mining NATO
Although there are always dangers when joining a social media site, there are also dangers associated with not joining one, as is the case with U.S. Adm. James Stavridis, who had his very own Facebook account opened for him by unidentified spies.
As NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, Stavridis is privy to invaluable and sensitive information, which the spies tried to access by creating a bogus Facebook account for the admiral and then sending friend requests to similar high-ranking officials.
Though the attackers weren’t conclusively identified, senior military officials and diplomats claimed that evidence suggested state-sponsored agents from China were to blame, and they were able to retrieve personal email addresses, phone numbers and photographs before the account was eventually shut down.
Since the incident, Stavridis has opened an authentic Facebook account, and MSNBC reports that, “NATO [has] advised [other] senior officers and officials to open their own social networking accounts to prevent a repeat.”
Social Media Sting
Sometimes citizens feel compelled to take the law into their own hands, which is what Jesper and Julie Myrfors did after they found out that their 17-year-old daughter was dating a Level 1 sex offender. Not content to ground the girl, they instead decided to set up a sting operation by posing as an underage 15-year-old girl and contacting the suspect boyfriend.
Their suspicions were confirmed when, after mere hours of contacting the boy, he began sending lewd photos of himself to the fake teenage girl. The Myrfors then showed this evidence to their daughter before turning it over to the police.
Though the outcome was a positive one in this case, it has also raised questions about parents’ responsibility in keeping an eye on their child’s social media usage.
Fan Boys Fall for Star Trek Page
When J.J. Abrams debuted a 3-frame clip (that’s right, 3 frames, not minutes, or seconds, but frames) from the new Star Trek Into Darkness movie on Conan O’Brien, it was enough to get fanboy juices flowing straight to the brain—to the point that it clouded their judgment.
As a result, a prankster exploited their excitement by creating a fake Facebook page for the movie claiming that if the page received 500,000 likes, they would release the trailer. Because Trekkies are reputed to be nerds, and nerds are supposed to be intelligent, it’s hard to believe that anybody fell for this at all, but apparently the page garnered almost 10,000 likes before it was discovered to be a hoax and the page was removed.
Fake Girlfriends for Hire
Finally, a story about fake Facebook accounts that people actually buy. A new service that calls itself Fake Internet Girlfriend is offering you the chance to receive all the social media benefits of a girlfriend without all of the real-world obligations. And at $250 a month, it’s a fraction of the price that wining and dining an actual girlfriend will cost you.
On their website, the service says it “allows our clients to [discreetly] employ real females to pretend to be their girlfriend online and communicate with them as if they were dating the person on various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.” To complete the effect, your fake girlfriend will comment on statuses, like your posts, and change “her” status to “In a Relationship.”
The only question not answered on the company website is whether or not it costs extra for them to kill off your fake girlfriend for additional internet sympathy points—Te’o style.
About the Author:
Ben Goldman is a writer, TV producer, and filmmaker from New York City. He’s worked for MTV and Comedy Central, and is currently a writer for Spy Tec, where he reports on topics related to surveillance, security, technology, and culture. Goldman also writes for the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel.