A couple of days ago a good friend of mine IM-ed me on Facebook.

Apparently he was on vacation in the UK and got mugged at the park of the hotel where he stayed. He needed some money to be sent over urgently via Western Union. And promised to pay me as soon as he got back. 

I agreed to send the money over and also told him to wait right there for the cops to arrive. I told him that I had friends at Facebook. And that his IP was being mapped to where he was. Apparently, he no longer needed money at that point!

If you got this in an email, you would have recognized it as scam-spam instantly. Actually, your email provider would have recognized it as spam and sent it to the spam folder. But this was on Facebook and the identity was very real. Here is how it happened...

My friend used his kid's computer to access his email once. That computer had a key logger installed. The scammer used the same credentials to log on to Facebook. Welcome to fraud in the new social media times!

Here are three things to do now if you think this can happen to you...

1.  If your kids have unattended access to any computer, child proof it. 

2. If you use the same password across email and social networking sites, change them.

3. Share this with your friends...

Next time, if a good friend IMs you and he addresses you by your last name, you might want to pay a little more attention. Especially if he wants money urgently by Western Union :-)

Know of more Facebook scams, post them in the comments!