Would Facebook Ask Me to Upload My Drivers License

The scam: Early on this morn a shut friend, I'll call her Rimini, woke up to numerous texts and vocalisation mails from her father and sister in Italy. Someone had been using what looked like her Instagram business relationship to follow and message her friends and family unit (including me) asking for money. Rimini's business relationship had been cloned. Cloning, a scam in which someone creates an account impersonating someone else's, is so common on Facebook and Instagram that it'southward ane of the handful of options bachelor when reporting an account as inappropriate. The scammers were targeting her friends and family, including grandparents in their 70s and 80s. Rimini was especially worried - an impersonator had successfully ripped off her grandparents several years ago with a similar scam.

The cloned account used Rimini's name and profile movie. The scammers had copied and reposted her photos and hashtags. To an elderly relative lacking tech savvy, the cloned account is indistinguishable from a real one. Rimini was worried. She contacted Instagram via a page dedicated to reporting cloned accounts.

Response from Facebook: The response from Facebook (the owner of Instagram) was more surprising than the original scam - the online form would not allow her to submit the course without a photograph of government issued ID or personal information such as a birth certificate, passport, driver's license, bank business relationship records, voter ID menu, medical records, social security menu, etc.

Even a second of muddled, pre-java idea makes obvious that this demand for a photo of ID or personal information is burdensome to the user, unnecessary to investigate the accusation of fraud, and would cost the company far more than than a mostly algorithmic approach - just more on that afterwards. Rimini was less than enthusiastic virtually providing additional personal information to the platform on which she was being scammed. But, to forbid the criminals stealing from her friends and relatives, she grudgingly complied and uploaded a photograph of her state issued driver's license. To protect her privacy, she blacked out her birthday, license ID number, and address. She went back to messaging her most vulnerable contacts, alarm them of the scam, waiting for the cloned account to be deleted. Fifty-fifty though Rimini uploaded the photo, instead of deleting the cloned account, Facebook has been sending her automated emails demanding a picture of her belongings her government issued or other form of ID. As of this writing, more than six hours later, many of Rimini's friends accept reported the account as an imposter, but the account is still upward, the scammer is still messaging people (including me) asking for coin, and has started threatening Rimini. When Rimini sent Facebook screen captures of the threats from the cloned account, she received the aforementioned automated response requesting that she send ID. Although Facebook has demanded this type of information from people locked out of their own business relationship, the threat of someone robbing your loved ones is a significantly more time-sensitive issue with less pressure to comply quickly. Coercion is a strong give-and-take, but I believe it applies.

The hypotheses: Scammers gonna scam. What's harder to understand is the tedious, inefficient, frustrating response from Facebook. I have two hypotheses to explain information technology: Facebook is dumb and Facebook is smart. The first hypothesis is that Facebook has an inefficient, expensive, largely transmission arroyo to reviewing these kinds of fraud considering Facebook could not come with a better organization. The visitor loses money, frustrates legitimate users, and allows the fraudsters to operate longer. In other words, the people running this type of security at Facebook are incompetent. I find this hypothesis hard to believe. The second hypothesis is that Facebook purposely requests this type of information and is slow to answer. They accept a mechanism to link these types of official records to your account, ostensibly as some form of verification, and monetize them. Equally a outcome, they have an incentive to let scammers harass their users until the users give Facebook more data. In other words, the profits from collecting additional personal data and adjustment with the criminals, are greater than the financial and reputation costs of maintaining an expensive, inefficient security process.

The Facebook is Dumb Hypothesis: The chief reasons I don't believe this are that, from a data science signal of view, algorithmically verifying Rimini's allegation is laughably easy. The clone of Rimini's account has the following, easily algorithmically verifiable properties: information technology was created hours ago; it uses the same profile picture as Rimini's much older account; all of the pictures in the clone account are copies of pictures from Rimini'south account; many of Rimini'southward followers (including me) flagged the clone account equally such; the proper name is very similar to the proper name on Rimini'south account; and, within hours of existence created, the clone account started messaging numerous people asking for coin. Even a scam that doesn't run across all those criteria should generate a very loftier "fraud likelihood score" leading to either an automated account suspension or a human reviewing the account. This kind of likelihood generation is very much how Google's reCAPTCHA works and even how Facebook claims its systems work. In summary, I don't believe Hypothesis I considering there is no style that I'm so much smarter than the entire Facebook security team that I merely designed (before my second coffee) a fraud-detection algorithm more than automated than theirs.

The Facebook is Smart Hypothesis: Several pieces of evidence advise that Facebook earns more than money than it loses from running an expensive, frustrating, manual procedure. Beginning, the distinction between the fine print in the online course and the fine impress on the e-mail are revealing. The email has a disclaimer that the photos of personal data submitted volition not exist kept. The web form, the first identify a user is asked to submit these, has a small disclaimer at bottom that says nil nigh Facebook not keeping the data. I think it is rubber to assume that Facebook keeps all of the information it doesn't promise not to. The company demands these types of data from people trying to unlock their account and collects information on people whether or not they are on Facebook or even accept an business relationship. Second, information of the kind requested (bank records, voter ID cards, medical records) are incredibly valuable and Facebook has already been fined billions of dollars for privacy violations for selling such information. And third, Facebook has already been criticized, fined, and forced to contrary some of their less scrupulous practices designed to gather more than information on people's identity.

My two cents on Facebook: Unfortunately, the idea that Facebook benefits from collecting the data of victims of fraud and as a result facilitates the scams, fits with the ethos of the company. Facebook was built not on technical or creative innovation, but on its ability and willingness to gather and exploit data. Starting from Zuckerberg's theft of the idea for the platform (for which Facebook paid a $65 million settlement), Facebook grew by exploiting its user's data to identify popular trends and potential competitors to imitate or buy. Facebook copied newsfeed from Twitter, Stories and numerous other features from Snap, invested in mobile based on tracking its users, bought WhatsApp and Instagram, etc. Although I've been on the platform since its showtime twelvemonth (my undergraduate university was among the start to which it expanded) I'm difficult pressed to proper name a single successful technical or artistic innovation, except for how to gather and exploit information. While imitating competitors and tracking user data are the lifeblood of many Silicon Valley giants, for most companies those are bugs/features rather than the core value proposition.

Facebook'south voracious hunger for information has led them to cull internet scammers over their users. Before long after the email from Facebook requesting her personal information, Rimini received a scarily similar request from the scammer.

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Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebook-coerces-victims-fraud-upload-birth-voter-id-card-scheinker

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