My mother had a similar thing happen, but it wasn’t on Facebook. It was a phone call at 2:00am. The person claimed to be her daughter and said that she was in New York, cracked out on drugs, and needed some money to come home. As the person called at 2:00am, my mom’s brain was a little fuddled and she didn’t catch on until the girl asked what my mom’s maiden name was.
Fortunately, this person didn’t get any useful information, but I can imagine that that sort of call must work sometimes.
I wouldn’t recommend this. There’s a good chance you’ll forget the fake answer and stump yourself.
Or end up with this scenario.
I use fake answers to security questions, but they’re logically derived (but only to me) and consistent, so I don’t forget them. For example, if it asks for my first pet’s name, instead I take the question as “what was your first pet name” and give the name my first boyfriend used to call me. Things like that.
I think msmith meant for your own personal account. Yes, a good question to ask them, but not to have that particular answer available somewhere in the account. So that as you said, her not having the answer ended the whole thing.
RealityChuck, yep, been there, done that! Well, stumped myself, hehe, not quite that scenario 
I got the London crisis email about a month ago. It was immediately obvious since the friend who supposedly sent it was on face book one day earlier lamenting the fact that her physical disability made it near impossible to venture out of her St. Louis Mo home.
I put a message on my face book page warning friends that a scammer was crawling through face book friends lists and sending out distressed traveler notices.
This one sure is getting around. I know 3 people that have had their email accounts hacked and these “I’m stranded overseas, send money” emails sent out to their contact lists.
Today’s lesson -
Make your passwords more secure. At least one of the three had her account hacked by someone just trying all the words in the dictionary.
I hope to Og I never go to London and get mugged. Nobody will ever believe me.
You’re very unlikely to get mugged in London full stop, but getting mugged at gunpoint is incredibly rare in the UK.
I created a special yahoo email account just to have a FB account. The yahoo account serves no other purpose. It contains no email address book, and when I login to it, I just delete every email I find (except any official FB emails) because I never use it to communicate with it. As for my FB account, there’s nothing in it to identify me. And my FB privacy settings are locked down tighter than a frog’s ass.
All because FB is more of a lark. Actual human to human communication is my thing. You know, face to face and phone calls with distant folks. Must be a generational thingie. If I want to find someone online, there are plenty of specialized search engines for that. And a few new ones that datamine FB and other social media sites. So I can find your FB details without using FB.
I got one of those in a text message a few weeks ago. It was sent, apparently, to everyone in “Joe”'s contact list, and one of the recipients was in the next room to him. “Hey, Joe, how’s the weather in London?” The text also contained a misspelling that Joe would never make, as it’s one of his pet peeves.
Then use something you’ll remember. Like **OpalCat’s **example.
No. Not specifically.
A lot of password recovery tools ask questions that you can figure out by looking at FB contents. Pet’s names or kid’s are common passwords, and if you have your dog in a photo captioned “Rover’s birthday party”, well, there it is! Or if there is a family photo that is tagged and you mom’s on FB they might get a clue to your mom’s maiden name (common requested by password retrieval programs). Stuff like that.
I dunno, have you seen Kermit’s ass? I got the impression you could shove your whole hand up there.
Looks like this was actually a legitimate email, but my first thought was that it was a phishing email from the scammer, trying to get you to log in to a dummy site. Glad that wasn’t it.
I’m 99% sure it was from facebook. It just sort of took me by surprised that my account would get locked down for reporting hers as being hacked. On the one hand I guess they might do that so if the bad guy puts any links on my page or sends me a text message with a link or does anything of the sort I can’t click on them, but the thing is…if I reported the problem, that implies I’m aware of what’s going on and besides other people where still posting on my wall so they could still see it.
I don’t know…strange.
Wait, I’ll bet they do it because some people have probably already been scammed (or at least accidentally given up their password) by the time they’re reporting it. All facebook was really doing was forcing me to change my password and giving someone on the FB team a chance to give my page a once over to make sure things like my email address haven’t been changed.