Unusual Tagged Scam - Social Network Site Scam

With the emerging of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Tagged, we get to experience more scams than ever.

Many people have created fake social profiles for many reasons. Some people are addicted to the sites' games and need the extra boost from another account, while some are purely for marketing purpose. Many foreign ladies who are working as cam girls or social escorts have made their presence more than ever in the social networking sites, which is safer than getting clients at Geylang physically. There are also scams that con male users to sign up at certain cam sites, which require their credit cards information.

Details of all these scams and how to identify them will be given in future blog posts.

In this post, we will share with you an unusual scam incident...

While most of the scam targets are male users of the social networking sites, photos of female users and hot celebrities are often being stolen and uploaded into the bogus user accounts. By pretending as hot girls, male users are likely to add or accept them as friends, and thus increasing the prey list.

However, this time, we have received a complaint about a scammer stealing picture of a male user in Tagged.

This scammer has uploaded 2 photos. The first photo is http://i7.tagstat.com/image06/0/5602/0008054s5o2.jpg, which seems to be stolen from Facebook from https://fbcdn-photos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/32097_398059863710_589113710_3979120_8259239_n.jpg and the scammer is too lazy to rename the caption, which shows the filename by default, so that we are able to find the original photo. However, we are unable to do reverse search for the Facebook profile of the original photo for further investigation.

This is the print-screen of the fake profile.

The Tagline "young and curious :)" would relate to perverts, who are hinting at girls that they are curious about sexual stuffs.

It seems that the scammer has registered the fake account since more than a year ago, but his Profile Views is sadly standing at only 704 times after being reported and friends of the victim has visited it.

This is probably the reason why the scammer has to steal another photo and use it to attract more girls.

The scammer's friends list currently has 80 friends, of which, more than 90% are female. Through his sexy Tagline, it is highly possible that the account is created to target female users who are open-minded and want to "try out" young guys who are curious about sex.

He has tried to get females to add him in MSN using the email lawrencex789@gmail.com.

We urge female users of social networking sites to beware of fakers. It is absolutely nothing wrong to make friends online and even date with your net friends, but we hope you will not end up meeting some old and fat guys who have shown you some hunks' photos.

We would also like to urge users to try to put watermark on their photos before uploading to their social profiles. It will reduce the chance of being stolen. Even if the scammers were to edit the photos to remove the watermarks, the photo size and quality will be affected, and thus it is easier for you to complain to the staffs of the social network sites to prove the ownership of the original photo.