Jason Kent, hacker-in-residence at Cequence Security, discusses fake online accounts, and the fraud they carry out on a daily basis.
Recently, one of my friends from my submarine days sent me a friend request on Facebook. The weird thing is, I was already connected with this friend. Looking further at the profile, I noticed a few of the same pictures but only 11 friends. So I knew this was some scammer and, being me, I messaged them.
“Long time no see man, how have you been?” I said. They replied with some short pleasantries and almost immediately began to ask if I knew about some program where I could get money. My response: “Where did you and I meet? What year, what state?” This wouldn’t be something they could know, because we met on a military base that wasn’t in either of our hometowns or current cities. They deleted the account almost immediately.
Fake accounts are used for other purposes too: Facebook for instance last fall announced the takedown of 14,000 fake accounts used to spread disinformation in the 2020 election.
