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Burglary Ring Used Facebook Places To Find Targets

Posted by timothy on from the my-younger-cousins-like-this-and-3-other-pages dept.

Kilrah_il writes "A burglary ring was caught in Nashua, NH due to the vigilance of an off-duty police officer. The group is credited with 50 acts of burglary, the targets chosen because they posted their absence from home on the Internet. '"Be careful of what you post on these social networking sites," said Capt. Ron Dickerson. "We know for a fact that some of these players, some of these criminals, were looking on these sites and identifying their targets through these social networking sites."' Well, I guess the prophecies came true."

3 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Not Places by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    They looked for status messages saying people were on vacation. A bit different from using Places.

  2. story summary is horseshit... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...No where in TFA was Facebook Places mentioned, just idiots who announced that they would not be at home. Looks like the submitter has an axe to grind with Places.

  3. A pretty comprehensive writeup... by Americano · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... from the Nashua Telegraph, the local newspaper for Nashua, NH. It's not yet clear how many of the burglaries were related to Facebook status updates - I've seen some news reports saying "all of them," and a few saying "only one."

    I think this case could be a very good lever for getting Facebook to change default permissions to "friends only" for everything, as most of the stories are suggesting that, where there's a facebook connection, the profiles were set to the default "everybody can ready my stuff" setting.