Sen. O'Reilly Warns About Facebook Fraud

Sen. Judi Buckley has known Sen. Nereida “Nellie” Rivera-O’Reilly for years, so when chatting on Facebook with a person who identified herself as her friend and colleague, Buckley quickly smelled a rat.

As a result, the real O’Reilly was alerted Monday to the fact that someone had set up a phony page on Facebook, pretending to be her, and had solicited funds from at least a few of the people the impostor had "friended."

On Tuesday, O’Reilly sent out a warning to all the friends of her two real Facebook pages, then deactivated them and contacted the social networking giant to tell them about the scam. She then sent out a press release to her constituents warning them as well.

In a phone interview Thursday, O’Reilly sounded bemused about the whole thing, but also urged people to exercise caution when online – because there are plenty of brazen hucksters out there – and in some ways the online universe can be a little like the Wild West, a lawless terrain where some people will take advantage if they can.

"They used an elected official to commit fraud," she said. "We were fortunate that we’re a small community. People know each other."

Buckley said she had been surprised last week to get the friend request from "Sen. O’Reilly," since she was already a friend to the senator’s two real Facebook pages – the one used for office announcements and a personal page, rarely used and not updated in months. But she looked at it and the photo on the page was the person she knew, so she accepted the friend request, the 13th person to do so.

A couple of days later, on Monday evening, Buckley got an offer to chat from "Sen. O’Reilly."

"The conversation did not sound like Nellie at all," Buckley said. Buckley asked about family members and the answer was always, "He’s fine."

With her suspicion building, Buckley asked, "Where are you." The answer was, "I am home."

"I knew that wasn’t the case and I knew that wasn’t Nellie," Buckley said.

Keeping the computer chat alive, Buckley at the same time sent a text message to O’Reilly and said they were in the middle of a Facebook chat together. And O’Reilly said, "No, I have not been on Facebook in forever."

O’Reilly put a warning on her own page, and about a dozen people shared the post, so the word got out.

One of the people who accepted the friend request from the ersatz O’Reilly told the senator this week that the person who chatted with her in the guise of the senator had asked for a donation. Peculiarly, the person asked the money to be sent by Western Union to another name at an address in Illinois, which was enough to signal that the request wasn’t genuine.

Asked if she thought anyone had fallen for the scam, O’Reilly said, "I don’t think so … the person was very smart and realized it wasn’t me. They realized that I would not do something like that."

Facebook has tools in place to protect its users’ privacy and its terms of use forbid using false names. But with more than a billion users worldwide, it is virtually impossible for the network to police everyone. For instance, Facebook requires users to be at least 13 years old, but in a 2011 survey, Consumer Reports magazine found 7.5 million children younger than 13 with accounts, 5 million younger than 10. Other estimates put those numbers even higher.

O’Reilly said her office doesn’t use social media much, usually when it has events planned for such causes as breast cancer awareness.

"We mostly use email as our means of communication," the senator said, sending out "a couple of thousand emails" when there’s something she wants to communicate to her constituents. This incident won’t prompt her to change her approach to communicating with residents.

Buckley said she also has two Facebook pages, one for her office and one personal, and the privacy setting on her personal page is set as tight as she can.

The lesson, Buckley said, is obvious.

"Be vigilant with who you would accept friend requests from and monitor your security settings," she said.

She also mentioned a report on CNN.com which offered more tips on securing your privacy online (link below.)