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Technology & Innovation — November 17, 2009

Facebook Theft?

Social-networking site Facebook is increasingly being used as a tool for thieves to target people – but also for cops to catch them red handed.

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In Venezuela police have discovered a pair of students at university in Caracas who have been robbing their Facebook friends’ homes using information taken from the social-networking site. “Police raided the apartment of one of two students who, working in tandem with another couple, had been using Facebook to befriend classmates. They then used the information their new ‘friends’ posted on their profiles to find out where they lived, what they owned and when they were not at home…Security analysts in Venezuela say it is becoming increasingly frequent for criminals to use social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Sonico and Hi5 as a source of information for house robberies, fraud and kidnappings. And it’s not just the criminals capitalizing on this online data source, the police too are using it, to go after both hard-core criminals and political protesters.”

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