A Minor Update to the Facebook Spoofer Story…
On Friday, we ran a story on three VCs who saw their Facebook, Twitter and email identities spoofed (featured today over at PEhub’s First Read).
It looks like the spoofer not only didn’t check his homework, but just couldn’t help himself from expanding his campaign to spoof the Web 2.0 world. Little old me had his identity spoofed as well.
Saturday morning, I received a status notification from Facebook stating that “Mark Hopkins” (sans the ‘rizzn’) had added me as a friend on Facebook. The profile looked more or less just like mine, except the birthdate was in April of ‘71, which added a good eight years to my age.
I Facebook messaged this faux-Mark Hopkins, and I got a similar reply to what John recieved on Monday.
This can happen to anyone. Hundreds of millions of users are at risk. Took 5 minutes. I wanted to you to see it. If I were a bad guy, I could intercept professional and personal interactions and steal social capital. I did nothing illegal. No laws against it. FB & Twitter verify aren’t the solution.
Single point of generation of a verified profile. Pan-Internet. Protected, trusted.
Web 3.0 is about trust.
And, I think it’s a brilliant way to raise money!
I tried to press further with him to get him to divulge his identity or tell me exactly what the heck he was pitching other than snake oil, fear, uncertainty and doubt, but to no avail.
It turns out that he also created a Twitter identity as well (@markrizzn), which is now closed out.
After 24 hours of no response from the faux-Mark, I reported his profile, since he was amassing a larger and larger number of my friends on Facebook in his friends list.
Since you’re here …
… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.
