Tips to avoid being scammed on Facebook

By Susan Salisbury

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A frantic e-mail message that said Jupiter real estate broker Marilyn Martens
was at a London hotel with her family and had been mugged at gunpoint went
out to all her contacts.

“I write this with tears in my eyes,” the email supposedly sent by
Martens in late August began. Martens needed money to pay her hotel bill,
and the embassy and the police would not help, it said.

Martens was of course, not really in England, but was going about her business
in Jupiter. A client who had received the email phoned her and said, “I
think you have been hacked.”

“My phone was ringing off the hook with people asking, “Are you in
England?” Martens said.

“My Facebook account was hacked. They were able to get into my AOL
account,” Martens said.

Unfortunately, one client out of the several hundred who received the e-mail
wired $1,550 to the scammers through Western Union, Martens said. The money
is gone.

“People need to know this is going on,” Martens said.

When Martens went into her Facebook account and changed her password she
discovered all her email contacts’ addresses were gone, as was all her new
mail. She contacted AOL, which helped her get the addresses back, and she
now has tighter security settings.

After the man sent the money to the scammers, he received a second e-mail
thanking him that said $2,000 more was needed. At that point he realized he
had been taken.

Facebook has just published A Guide to Facebook Security, available
free on its website. Here are the top tips to protect your Facebook account:

• Only friend people you know.
• Create a strong password and use it only for Facebook.
• Don’t share your password.
• Change your password on a regular basis.
• Share your personal information only with people and companies that need it.
• Log into Facebook only once each session. If it looks like Facebook is asking
  you to log in a second time, skip the links and directly type www.facebook.com
  into your browser address bar.
• Use a one-time password when using someone else’s computer.
• Log out of Facebook after using someone else’s computer.
• Use secure browsing whenever possible.
• Only download applications from sites you trust.
• Keep your anti-virus software updated.
• Keep your browser and other applications up to date.
• Don’t paste script (code) in your browser address bar.
• Use browser add-ons like Web of Trust and Firefox’s NoScript to keep your
  account from being hijacked.
• Beware of “goofy” posts from anyone – even friends. If it looks like
  something your friend wouldn’t post, don’t click on it.
• Scammers might hack your friends’ accounts and send links from their accounts.
  Beware of enticing links coming from your friends.

To file a complaint

To file a complaint about an Internet crime scheme, go to www.ic3.gov.
The Internet Crime Complaint Center is a partnership between the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, the National White Collar Crime Center and the
Bureau of Justice Assistance.

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$1.6 billion in first half: Facebook revenues low?

Facebook’s revenue in the first half of 2011 reached $1.6 billion, according to an unnamed source with knowledge of the financials, Reuters reports. The same source says net income in the first half of 2011 approached $500 million.

We contacted the company but, still private, Facebook does not disclose financial results.

The numbers are interesting nonetheless because, to date, we have largely relied on third-party estimates of ad revenues for Facebook and other private social sites. Notably, this source has Facebook’s revenues pegged much lower than those recently forecasted by eMarketer.

In June, the Internet marketing researcher said Facebook’s display revenues–in the U.S. alone–would grow an estimated 80.9 percent to $2.19 billion. It was the same number eMarketer had reported back in January, when the group published a report predicting Facebook’s global ad revenue would reach $4.05 billion.

That’s not even counting revenues collected from virtual goods, a huge moneymaker for Facebook, which collects 30 percent of every sale.

And yet, if we assume (perhaps unfairly) that Facebook’s revenue will not grow more in the second half of 2011, then total global revenue for the entire year will be around $3.2 billion, far below just the $4.05 billion in ad revenues predicted by eMarketer. Either the social network has a lot of room to expand over the next few months or eMarketer’s numbers are way, way off.

No matter which way you look at it, however, it’s clear that Facebook is now a dominant force in ad selling on the Web. Another Web researcher, comScore, said over the summer that the social network now makes up the most display ad impressions in the U.S., accounting for nearly a third of the entire market. With over 750 million members, it’s no wonder why.

It’s that kind of influence that has pushed the company’s valuation to around $80 billion on the secondary markets. Although, a major sale of Facebook stock last month gave the company a $66.5 billion valuation–still high, but not so dramatically.

Facebook has not yet indicated specific plans to go public, though analysts have said to expect the move either late this year or by the spring of 2012.

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