Social Software Explored

I was working late tonight when I received a Facebook Chat request from a friend of mine that I have not spoken to in some time. The request came shortly after this person’s Facebook Status was updated to “NEEDS HELP URGENTLY” - so it wasn’t a total surprise.  When the chat started, I was expecting a request to help with a coding issue or web site problem.  Since we had worked on several projects together I had assumed that this was the nature of the issue.  Here is how the Chat began to transpire:

My friend comes from overseas so this is not a completely far fetched idea but it was very strange that he reached out to me since I am not in his first or second tier of friends.  It all sounded too weird.  I then responded with:

He never really answered my question about helping me guarantee that it was him so I became suspicious at this point and went back to Facebook.  By now a few people had commented on his status and so I questioned them about my friend’s whereabouts - wondering if there was any chance that he was overseas.  I then asked again about confirmation that he was who he said he was:

“worked at the consulting gig for a year” - I almost hired this person for a job at my company and he didn’t even say the magic word “CommonSpot”.  That is all I really need to hear from him and I would have probably sent him whatever he needed.  The conversation finally ended up here:

So there are a few morals to this:

1.) Don’t ask me for money on Facebook when you know my phone number and you worked with me on a CommonSpot project

2.) Be careful if someone asks you for money anywhere on any site

3.) Join a site like Dopplr and if you are a hacker - make sure that you hack that site too and post a trip.

UPDATE: Looks like there were more reports of this exact same thing happening elsewhere that night:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/05/facebook.impostors/index.html

facebook, hack, phishing, Status Updates