I recently reconnected with an old friend from high school on Facebook a few days ago. Last night he sent me an invitation on Messenger. Or at least I thought it was him. In reality, it was a scammer from overseas that saw he was recently added to my profile and copied his photo into a fake profile and pretended to be my friend. I knew there was something odd when he only wanted to talk about a grant program that gave him $150,000 cash. He showed me a picture of a pile of cash and a FedEx driver who delivered the box of cash. "All you you have to do is call a number and pay a small application fee," he said. "Trust me, it's not a scam." Turns out this is a big scam and I ended up blocking this person. They just take your application fee and maybe any personal data you provide and you get nothing. This got me to thinking about data breaches and identify theft, which have been big news this year.
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Scams and Identity Thieves
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I recently reconnected with an old friend from high school on Facebook a few days ago. Last night he sent me an invitation on Messenger. Or at least I thought it was him. In reality, it was a scammer from overseas that saw he was recently added to my profile and copied his photo into a fake profile and pretended to be my friend. I knew there was something odd when he only wanted to talk about a grant program that gave him $150,000 cash. He showed me a picture of a pile of cash and a FedEx driver who delivered the box of cash. "All you you have to do is call a number and pay a small application fee," he said. "Trust me, it's not a scam." Turns out this is a big scam and I ended up blocking this person. They just take your application fee and maybe any personal data you provide and you get nothing. This got me to thinking about data breaches and identify theft, which have been big news this year.