Burglary Ring Used Facebook Places To Find Targets

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."

Comments

Re:Nothing new

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

And Google Street View's a gift for casing the joint - checking houses without burglar alarms, or with old/cheap ones

Yeah because you can totally see a burglar alarm from the street -- with google's resolution you can't even see if they have a sticker in the window.

practicalities

[merry-v]

i don't understand how the burglars were able to quickly trawl facebook to find :

a) the street addresses of the people who were on holiday, not normally stored in facebook?
b) who did not co-habit with people who were not on holiday
c) who had stuff worth stealing
d) living within easy driving distance of the burglar
e) no alarm, neighborhood watch, alert neighbours etc
f) the exact days of leaving and arriving back

burglars already have lots of ways to find a target house without data mining social networking sites, e.g. pushing flyers half-way into letter boxes then coming back in two days to see if any are still untouched, driving buy in the evening to see if lights are off etc etc.

is it possible that some of those got burgled who had posted about their holiday, and told the police "that must be the reason" ? I know TFA asserts that the police know the gang used facebook, but something does not add up here. seems like BS to me.

Re:practicalities

[Anonymous Coward]

For the street address, if people use their full name in facebook and list their town, there's a good chance that you can get a correct address from the white pages. As for whether other people will be home, if they say "family vacation", that gives a good probability that every one in the house will be gone. As to the other things you pointed out (alarm, neighborhood watch, whether they have stuff worth stealing), you're correct. They probably have to case the joint in person to get that info. But at least they know they're casing a place that will be vacant on a particular day. Someone might case my house and determine I'm an excellent prospect, but if I don't go on vacation for a year then they haven't got anything.

Re:Always change your privacy settings

[causality]

So you're trashing something you don't use or understand.

Actually I don't use it because I understand it. Maybe you don't know this, but you can look before you leap, you can read up on something and learn something about it before deciding whether you will engage in it.

By your false logic, every non-smoker on the planet was once a smoker since they would never know why tobacco use is detrimental to health until after trying it and experiencing worse health. There's this thing called foresight that makes that unnecessary.

Incidentally "trashing" is a very strange term to describe calmly and honestly discussing its disadvantages. I think you have a sore point. Apparently the idea that others might have good reasons for not doing something that you have your reasons for doing is inflammatory and offensive to you. Most of the problems in the world are caused by an inability to live and let live, which in turn is rooted in mentalities like yours. You deserve every last bit of misery it causes you.

Dispute me on that if you think you can, though at this point the prudent thing for you would be to silently disappear and pretend you didn't notice my reply.

Re:Nothing new

[NotQuiteReal]

Funeral notices are the classic... what close family members don't go to the funeral?

People just don't think it through

[dreamchaser]

I wish I had mod points to mod you up.

What many people seem to fail to see is that every single datapoint one gives out can be combined with others to often paint a far clearer picture of your life and it's details than one might think. It would actually be fairly trivial to put in a few weeks of work in order to build a list of targets ripe for the picking, if that.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Legion303]

Security through obscurity is worthless. I think what you mean is "security WITH obscurity," which is one of the levels of layered security everyone should use.