"Your Son's Identity has been Stolen from Facebook"

For the benefit of everyone, I've decided to explain why I recently pulled down My Yellow Ribbon for a little more than a month.

About 6 weeks ago, I received an email from a woman who identified herself as retired Air Force.  The subject of the email was "Your son's identity has been stolen from Facebook" and it read as follows:

Dear Ms. Davin,
            I’m writing to you because I have tried to contact your son, Tyler, through Facebook and not sure that he received my message.  This is going to sound really off the wall, but please trust that I’m trying to warn your son and your family of identity theft.  I really feel nervous about writing to you and your son about this, but if it happened to me I would want someone to come forward and let me know.

            My name is Theresa and I signed up to a dating website for military members.  I’m retired Air Force of 24 years and returned from deployment in 2007.  Anyway, I got a message from a guy who was interested and after talking to him for 2 days, I realized that he was a fraud. This man was pretending to be your son.  He sent me three pictures of your son, told me about where he lived and what he did in the military.  There was quite a bit of personal information that this man was telling me, in detail.  This guy didn’t know that I was prior military, so some of the stuff he was telling me I knew was not true.  So, I started asking more specific questions and started investigating.  I found your son on Facebook by his last name and I knew what unit he was assigned to by the patches on his arm in the pictures that were sent to me.  So, I tried to find Sgt Davin to warn him.  I feel that it is very important that he puts a red flag on his credit and whatever else to protect his identity.  I have already reported the scam to the FBI (no lie, I really did).  I, also, have an appointment this Thursday with the US Attorney’s office to turn over all documentation that I have.  I was actually contacted by phone by a Muslim man trying to get me to pay for Sgt Davin’s luggage to be returned to the states….lol  This scam was very crazy.  I kept, and documented, everything. 

            I think your son thinks I’m crazy…lol  I’m just trying to protect a fellow soldier from further identity theft.  I found your e-mail from your blog website : http://my-yellow-ribbon.blogspot.com/p/my-yellow-ribbon-story-by-soldiers.html.  I understand that this sounds bizarre, and trust me, it was a trip for me too knowing that people from other countries really get away with this stuff.  Anyway, if it’s not too intrusive, I will e-mail you Thursday afternoon after I return from the US Attorney’s office to let you know what they advised.  I will have to give them the information that I received from these foreigners about your son.  I’m sure that you and your family will not be contacted or disturbed, but with great respect, feel that you should at least know what is going on.  If you have any questions, I don’t mind if you call me.  My cell phone is XXX-XXX-XXXX.  I live in NE Oklahoma and work at the Department of Veterans Affairs while attending Northeastern State University as a Psych major.  I, also, have two teenage children.  So you can see why this has me up in arms. 

            Again, I apologize for any inconveniences that I may have caused you.  Please take care and God Bless you and your family.

 

Sincerely and Respectfully,

Theresa (last name withheld)

Because I wasn't sure if the photos and information was stolen from Facebook or the blog, I opted to remove My Yellow Ribbon from public view.  As a precaution, I advised Tyler to put a fraud report on his SSN and to limit the viewership to his photos.  As this story played out, Theresa did speak with the FBI and US Attorney's office, but unfortunately they are inundated with these reports and there is little they can do.  I asked Theresa to verify her identity by sending me a copy of her DD214, which she did quickly and sent along with other military IDs.  I was encouraged by others to verify that I wasn't being scammed.

Nonetheless, not much ever came from it.  She did share with me the photos of Tyler and the texts that were sent to her claiming to be my son.  In fact, this person tried to extort money from her by claiming to have luggage stuck in Pakistan and he requested she help him get his luggage back.  Interestingly, Tyler did have some belongings stolen from the Conex at the end of his deployment before he was stateside.

I write about this to alert you why it's important that you protect your photos by limiting the audience.  If you post photos on Facebook, limit the viewing to your "friends only" or at a maximum "friends of friends."  It's creepy that it's so easy to copy someone's identity.  As it turns out, I think it's unlikely that the scammer was able to obtain any personal information. 

So, who can see and copy your photos?