This is a guest post by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal, a firm doing local Internet marketing .
This morning, I got a Facebook chat window pop-up from someone I barely know (yeah, don’t you hate that “popping” sound it makes?) It was from someone well-known in the industry, of whom I have many friends in common. I won’t out him here.It took me a while to realize that he was hacked, as normally I’d assume that people I’m chatting and emailing with are who they appear to be.
This is WAY beyond just phishing or sending fake emails— this is logging in as them and engaging in a whole chat. Makes those Nigerian letters– you know, the ones you get from the wife of the deceased dictator, asking to help her reclaim the $16 million dollars– look like child’s play.
I can just imagine a group of folks in the Philippines or India making $2 an hour, following a script to chat with folks. If you had 100,000 hacked Facebook accounts and each worker could do 20 chats an hour, then 50 workers could do 8,000 accounts a day. Thus, in 2 weeks, you could get through the whole list. If even 1% of the folks gave you $1,000, that’s $80,000 in revenue. The cost would only be $10,000, so that’s $70k in profit. Did I do my math right?
If the hacker had 10 million accounts, then they’d earn $7 million. Don’t laugh, since I know folks who have hacked Hi5, for example, for their entire user database of passwords. And just imagine if they got their conversion rate (victim rate) up to 5%, which is only 1 in 20– then they earn 5 times the amount, which is $40 million in gross revenue.
This is the new level of spam folks, so watch out. If you really want to make money in affiliate marketing and have no ethical or legal boundaries, there is a ton of money for you, as well as almost certain jail time. And, by the way, if you want to know of the biggest affiliate in the industry who has never gone to jail, talk to Scott Richter .
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Wow!!!..That’s crazy.. Thanks for the warning. I didn’t have the kNOWLEGDE that hackers can do thing in that nature.Only thought about myspace,twitter didn’t think “FACEBOOK” wow…
This is really creepy. I heard that Facebook accounts can be hacked, but to use them in such a way? Unfortunately this has the potential of tricking many naive internet users. Also, some users accept a lot of friends they don’t know (we all have a couple of friends we don’t really know, no? but some have thousands), which raises the danger since the ‘fraudster’ can potentially be the person whom you’ve really befriended – no need for hacking at all in this case.
Udi Schlessinger´s last blog ..11 Twitter Sites and 1 Twitter Tool that You Really Need If You Use Twitter
It’s really sad how many people out there will do whatever it takes to make a quick buck, even if it means preying on innocent, naive people. Hopefully everyone will do their due diligence (just as Dennis did) when put in a similar situation, and not fall for these evil Hackers’ tricks.
Yes you never know with who is who contacting you. I had someone I suspect to be just a fake person contact me on my blog yesterday but a whois look up found them out.
Murray´s last blog ..Social Media Disaster, Trust and Winning Trust Back
I still can’t believe they did that. Instead of helping the situation with a
honest, genuine reply, they made things worse by acting shady and dishonest. It will be interesting to see how their reputation is affected in the space if they continue to do that.
Just goes to prove that relationships are made in person and that convenience of being on-line isn’t what is always appears. Don’t take Facebook or any profile for granted.
Dennis Yu´s last blog ..Check your landing pages for this
So, it’s a matter of phishing to get the accounts. Is prevention simply a matter of rotating passwords periodically? Once hacked what can a person do to regain control of their account?
Keith Wilcox´s last blog ..Chris Larrabee