Facebook LIKE IT Scams

For various reasons, many people have been trying hard to get more subscribers on their Facebook. This is why many scams have appeared in Facebook and most of them do not even require any programming or hacking tactic.

One of the most common Facebook scams is to get people to LIKE certain image in order to "make things happen". There are scams that say if you like the image, your Facebook profile will change colour there from the original blue one, while some say if you LIKE it, special things will appear or the image will move.

The reason why scammers would want more people to LIKE their images is so that the victims' friends would see the same post in their news feed, so that they can fall into the trick (LIKE it) too. This chain effect can spread extremely fast.

The latest Facebook LIKE IT scam is about the change of notification icon into a "heart". This scammer (We are not sure if he's the originator) would even prevent people from commenting on his post so that nobody can expose him straight away. Next, he added comments that whoever subscribes to his profile would get 200 new friends requests. This is definitely tempting to Facebook users who wish to become more popular by having more friends.

This scammer's name is Phillip Johnson with the URL of https://www.facebook.com/PjayalwaysStrappeg and he has created many scams to make himself popular.

Singapore Female Scammer Arrested

As according to AsiaOne, the 32-year-old woman suspected of nine scam cases was arrested on 26th April 2012 morning.

She has cheated victims of their money by lying to them that her husband was hospitalised and she needed the money urgently and would return the victims on the very next day. Amount loaned to her was from $50 to $450.

After the police appealed to the public for information, they got the female suspect's address, which was at Bangkit Road and soon led to her arrest.

We would advise public not to lend money to strangers or even "net friends", even if they were to claim that they would return the money on the very next day.

Police Seeks Help to Locate Singapore Malay Scammer

Police are looking for the woman shown in the picture to assist with investigations into a series of cheating scams reported islandwide.

Between 20 Feb 2012 & 6 Apr 2012 , Police received several reports regarding a female suspect soliciting monies from victims on the pretext that her husband was hospitalised and needed money urgently. Out of sympathy, the victims handed monies ranging from S$50 to S$450 as loans to the suspect who promised to repay them the following day. After collecting the money, the suspect became evasive and remained uncontactable.

The suspect is described as a Malay woman in her 30s, between 1.55m and 1.6m tall, of medium built and has short or shoulder length hair.

Anyone with information can call the Police Hotline at 1800-255-0000. All Information will be kept strictly confidential.

Meanwhile, Police would like to take this opportunity to remind members of the public to be wary when they encounter cases of similar nature. Do not hesitate to call the police if you sense something amiss.

Tagged Scammer Lawrence Tan Failed

The tagged scammer's account, which we have reported last year, has finally been removed by Tagged on around 9th January 2012.

Initially, the owner of the photo stolen by this scammer had tried to email Tagged as indicated in their website. After the first respond of Tagged to ask for a recent photo of the owner/victim, all emails sent to them were "bounded" back. There was totally no way to contact the staffs for assistance as they did not even have a "contact us" form.

This Lawrence Tan scammer eventually strike using the mobile phone chat feature of Tagged to try to hook up with the victim's friend (he obviously didn't know their relationship) and she managed to make him divulge his MSN email (lawrencex789@gmail.com), and thus pawning himself.

He could have been considering to abandon that email address ever since...

Anyway, if you were to google for the email lawrencex789@gmail.com, you can probably find him being involved in an adult forum, which is mainly in Chinese language. A brief investigation of the website shows that it displays photos and contact numbers of China women who come over to Singapore to make extra money.

You can probably guess what Lawrence has been up to all these years.

Before Lawrence Tan's Tagged account was removed, probably with the aid of the victim's friends who had helped to report him, he had uploaded and changed his default photo to a picture of a dance floor. He had removed another victim's photo from his profile but still keeping the latter one.

Girls, please be aware of the people you make friends with through the internet. If they were to add you up in MSN or other messengers such as Yahoo or Skype, make sure they have webcam to prove that the photos in their social network profiles really belong to them.

Please do not be fooled by guys with big belly, sitting in front of their computers and getting satisfied by online teasing or whatever.

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.