Don’t get robbed: burglars use facebook to pick targets

Most people freely post things like, “going out of town, I’ll miss everyone” on their facebook or twitter without a second thought; but really should you so freely expose your information to others? This article is short and, hopefully, a simple wake up call to not only purchase a security system but to also take caution of what you say.

Orignial source: http://mashable.com/2010/09/11/facebook-places-burglars/

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People said it would happen with Foursquare, it may have already happened with Twitter, and now the trend has continued on Facebook: Burglars in Nashua, New Hampshire looked at updates from Facebook to figure out when one target wasn’t at home.

Police caught three young men who had used “social networking sites like Facebook to identify victims who posted online that they would not be home at a certain time,” according to local news station WMUR 9.

That said, don’t jump to conclusions. The burglars weren’t using the new Facebook Places location system, despite implications by The Huffington Postand other web publications. Facebook released the following statement published by NECN:

We’ve been in contact with the Nashua police, and they confirmed that they while they have an ongoing investigation and have already made a number of arrests, the only Facebook link was that one of those arrested had a Facebook friend who posted about leaving town in the near future (which is why they believe that home was targeted) and it had nothing to do with Facebook Places. The police confirmed that the other burglaries had nothing to do with Facebook altogether.

These particular burglars performed more than 50 burglaries but they didn’t use Facebook Places, and they may have only targeted one person by looking at his Facebook page. But it goes to show that you should be careful even if you’re using Facebook’s privacy settings to make your updates viewable only to friends.

We’ve heard speculationthat burglars would use Facebook status updates to target people in the past, but this time it looks like it’s not just talk. So let this be a warning: Be careful what you include in your social media updates.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Fertnig

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redwire,

Real. Expert. Security