Theres been multiple warnings about being careful with Facebook/MySpace status updates. “Vacationing in France for two weeks!” “Going into hospital for surgery.” Burglars pay a visit to your home. Or, heres a photo of my new $9000 plasma big screen. Even my local news has reported some local facebook robberies.
How can some burglar search all those accounts for vacation plans, hospital visits etc? AND specifically find people within 50 miles of his house? Thats some kind of magical computer voodoo there.
Even then, how does he tie a user account to a specific street address? I can’t believe anybody is stupid enough to include that in any Online profile.
I use twitter. I know you can search for hashtags. #Vacation#funinthesun#pleaserobme AFAIK you can’t restrict the search to a specific city.
What the heck are these robbers doing to target these accounts?
That’s why you have to pay attention to your privacy settings and not attempt to document your entire life on Facebook.
As far as how they find you, as little as a name, a city, and a phonebook can be all that’s needed to find someone’s address. There’s also pay sites like Intelius.
As for how they find specific accounts, that could be as simple as just plugging in names from the local phonebook.
And frankly, if you’re stupid and/or naive enough to post “Look at my new 70” TV! Looking forward to watching it in two weeks when I get home from the Galapagos Islands where I’ll be completely out of touch from civilization!" then you probably deserve to get robbed.
Uploaded photos from smart phones can contain GPS information of where the photo was taken. If you upload something like “my new car in the driveway”, the crooks can pinpoint where that photo was taken within about 50 feet plus know what your driveway looks like.
I upload GPS data from bicycle rides to a web site. Someone looking at those rides could tell (1) where I probably live, (2) what time of day I’m gone on bike rides, and (3) someone riding a $3K bicycle probably has other stuff worth stealing. Of course I have it set to block public viewing of rides that start from my home.
What i wonder is if the extra research is really that much more profitable to the thieves than just cruising through nice neighborhoods and looking for the un-picked up newspapers and full mailbox.
Yes you do, but there are any number of web sites/apps these days that ask you to connect your Facebook account and grant them random levels of access and any number of people who accept whatever random friend request comes their way. You will be surprised what people will unthinkingly accept.
All the “big ones” have already been covered in previous responses. You should treat ANYTHING you post on a social site as public knowledge. Privacy settings only work so long as the site is doing its job. If it lapses, everything you’ve set to “private” can become “public.” The best bet is to play important details close to your vest.
If you’re posting pics anywhere on the web, scrub them first by running them through a program like MetaStripper. That way your picture is just a picture, and not a detailed record of your activities.
You don’t have to go overboard – a little paranoia goes a long way
It’s not just random robbers, though. If you have your privacy set to Everyone or Friends of Friends, and your cousin or coworker Likes or comments on your vacation commentary, they could have an unethical friend/relative who sees that show up in their feed and decides to take advantage of this data.
That’s pretty cool how they incorporated your Facebook stuff into the little film. The ending didn’t really work with whatever info they pulled from my page, though, and I don’t have strict privacy settings.
We like to think that robberies are committed by random evil people - we couldn’t possibly know anyone like that. But let’s be real here. You probably do know some criminals, especially if you’re one of those people who has friended every high school pal, college acquaintance, coworker and hot chick at the last party.
(As an example for businesses: On average, they’ll lose more dollar value in theft by their own employees than by burglars or shoplifters.)
Anyway, even if we are talking about strangers… In Washington state’s King County, property tax listings are publicly available by address, and those listings include the owner’s name. So if you’re cruising the street and see a house that looks interesting, five minutes of web searching will reveal who owns the house and whether they’ve posted public information about where they are. I don’t know other counties, states, countries, etc. but the fact is that lots of information is available out there. It’s very easy to connect the dots, and the SmartPlant article shows that burglars usually return to a house multiple times before they successfully break in. They’re clearly putting enough time into it to a little checking up.
Apart from the bit showing your Facebook page, does the sequence of the film vary? In mine, the villain spent a LOT of time looking at the screen getting frustrated before looking at the camera and getting in his car.
This is very true. Just as ‘stranger-on-stranger’ violent attacks such as rape and murder, are pretty rare, the chances that you have only a few degrees of separation between whoever decides to rob you is pretty good.
Not necessarily someone you know as a friend, but probably someone who knows your name, or knows your friend, or has seen your place and been watching you.
My county also has a section on it’s web site where property ownership research can be done. You can enter a person’s name and it will show all properties owned by that person. This is helpful if someone owes you money and you want to put a lien on their property.
Or you can simply enter the address and find out who the current owner is. And among other info you will see the assessed tax value, a picture an measurements of the property lines, dates the house was built, and just about everything that the county has on file about the place.
This info is used by lenders to do a preliminary work-up when you apply for a loan. The last time I got a home equity loan the bank had all the information ready and just did a drive-by assessment to make sure the place was still standing.
Most people are unaware that these databases exist across the country now. If you poke around on your local county web site you may find it in your area. My county is very large rural/timber country and yet I can find all this info and I’ll bet you can in your area too.
I was looking for the original source of the 80% claim that the link in the OP said Credit Sesame made and so far came across this: http://www.creditsesame.com/blog/social-media-safety-dont-make-it-easy-for-burglars/
What’s interesting is that this page, a few days older than the link from the OP, contains the same infographic. Except that the wording is slightly different. Instead of saying that 80% of the ex-burglars they interviewed used Facebook, Twitter, etc. this one says that that percent of burglars believe that thieves use social media to target properties. At least one poster on a message board believes it’s a meaningless statistic.
ETA: I missed it, but that link is also in the page the OP linked to. Which makes me suspect that what’s posted in the OP’s link is the original graphic and Credit Sesame later changed it because it didn’t reflect the results of their survey.
That’s what he did with mine. But he ended up going to downtown Chicago for some reason, at the end. While I do live in Chicago, I don’t live anywhere near where the map showed at the end, and the last picture he looked at was a picture taken in Iowa, so I’m unclear what happened there.
My dad passed away a year and a half ago. We had a graveside funeral and wake.
I didn’t know it until after the services, but my step mom got someone to house sit for her. She told me that there was stories of burglars who read the obituaries, in order to find homes that would be unattended during the listed funeral times.
Disclaimer: It may be more of an urban legend than fact, I don’t know. But she believed it.
During a family funeral, one of our relatives had their home burgled. Thankfully, we were unlisted at the time, so that probably kept us safe (mid 90s).
A special kind of hell for those people. Special kind of hell.
My best friend died suddenly when we were teenagers. You know those donation cans you sometimes see at gas stations/grocery stores/whatever for the families of sick/dead kids? Somebody went to every store in our small town that had one of those cans for my friend and “collected the donations for the family” while we were all busy at her funeral.
Perhaps they got that info from the obit, I don’t know.
Just as he was walking away from the car, my neighbor knocked on my door.
What does the lolipop site do? I just get a blue lolipop with a razor blade in it. Clicking does nothing. I tried it on IE and all it did was open a Facebook login page. Clue for the clueless?
I have a host of reasons to avoid giving out personal information. Somewhere on the list is identity theft.
It pulls info from your Facebook page and then shows a creepy guy looking at your profile and figuring out where you live. Then he drives all the way to your place to offer you a lollipop with a razor inside.
I was impressed that he drove all the way to Seoul.
