A Wisconsin woman has been charged with theft over accusations she tried to profit from Facebook’s much-anticipated plans to go public by selling fake stock in the social media giant.

Facebook announced on Wednesday its plans for the biggest-ever Internet IPO.

In a criminal complaint on Thursday, prosecutors said Marianne Oleson told acquaintances she obtained $1 million in stock because her daughter was an acquaintance of Facebook’s founder and persuaded several people to buy fictitious Facebook stock over a four-month period.

The Oshkosh woman was charged with 31 counts of theft, forgery and making misleading statements.

One of Oleson’s victims was a contractor who did work at her house in September. Oleson paid the contractor for the work with $13,980 worth of fake Facebook stock, the complaint alleged.

The contractor, who also paid $10,000 in cash to the woman for additional stock, grew suspicious when he found she lied about her name and various oddities on documents referring to the transaction.

Oleson, 46, was also accused of defrauding a 66-year-old Oshkosh man who was suffering from a vision impairment. According to the district attorney, the man gave Oleson four checks totaling about $43,000 late last year to pay for Facebook stock.

The woman promised him she would send stock certificates in the mail. Oleson is also accused of selling fake Facebook stock to two other men for a total of $9,900.

What each of her four victims say they did receive was a document describing the private stock offering — a document Oleson had received when she contacted OM Investment Management LLC, a legitimate owner of 65,000 shares of private Facebook stock, about purchasing $1 million worth of stock from the company. She allegedly took the share subscription agreement they sent, changed a few words and offered it to her victims as proof of her good faith.

If convicted, she will not only miss the legitimate Facebook IPO, but will also face 218 years, 30 days in prison and $418,000 in fines. Her bond is set at $50,000, and she is due back in court next week.

Read story@ msnbc

Other Sources: newsfeed.time.com

Talk about getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

A former finance director at the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York admitted on Tuesday to stealing more than $300,000 from the organization. She is Yaasmin Hooey, 35, of Manhattan.

That’s enough for more than 80,000 boxes of Tagalongs (Peanut Butter Patties). But Hooey wasn’t buying cookies. Instead, she was spending the money on cruises, cosmetic laser procedures and a $13,000 diamond ring. She also spent $18,000 in bars and restaurants, according to the District Attorney’s Office. Life is not going to be so luxurious behind prison bars.

She plead guilty to second-degree grand larceny. Hooey admitted stealing $311,568 between September 2008 and December 2010. “She began stealing from the non-profit as soon as she began working for them,”  said assistant district attorney Lauren Littman.

Hooey admitted forging the signature of the organization’s then-chief executive and writing 65 checks to herself from a payroll account. Nine wire transfers also moved money from two of the nonprofit’s bank accounts to Hooey’s own account.

In addition to spending the stolen money on luxury items, she used some of the money for “personal expenses” including groceries, a gym membership, clothing, and commuter train tickets.

She will be sentenced in the New York Supreme Court on March 6.

Read story@ msnbc

People who have been the victim of identify theft know it can take months or even years to clean up the mess. It is one of the most stressful experiences one can have. The story I am about to share is very real. A close friend of mine was a victim of such a crime and the fact that someone was able to reset that person’s email password was all they needed to gain their personal information. Ironically, this person didn’t use simple passwords, yet it was still done. Still, make your passwords and security questions unique and don’t use the same information for multiple accounts. In fact, make the answers to your questions incorrect – just random information that isn’t even true. You may have to write down this information since all of us have so many accounts – making it impossible to remember everything. But, this minor inconvenience sure beats the major nightmare you will live if your identity is even stolen.

Herbert Thompson seems like just another smart academic software developer who loves formulas and geeking out. But he’s also stolen the identities of several casual acquaintances. In fact, in one case he gained access to a bank account in seven shockingly simple steps. He didn’t use any programming tricks, just a little sleuth work.

As part of an experiment and with the permission of some people he barely knew, Thompson stole identities to show the public how easy it is to get access to personal data and banking information. He proved it only requires some simple surfing for freely available personal data. What the following steps show is how vulnerable we all are to security breach.

The victim: He knew her name was Kim, where she was from, where she worked and roughly her age. He also knew the name of her bank and her username, although as Thompson says, this was easy to guess—it was her first initial and last name.

Seven Steps:

1)    He googles her and finds a blog and a resume. (Thompson called her blog a “goldmine.”) He gets information about grandparents, pets, hometown. Most important he gets her college email address and current gmail address.

2)    Next stop: Password recovery feature on her bank’s web site. He attempts to reset her bank password, but the bank sends a reset link to her email. He now needs to gain access to her gmail account.

3)    Gmail access: He attempts to reset her gmail password but gmail sends this to her college email address. Gmail tells you this address’ domain (at least it did in 2008 when Thompson conducted the experiments) so he knew he had to get access to that specific address.

4)    College email account page: Thompson clicks the “forgot password” link on this page and winds up facing a few questions. Home address, home zip code and home country? No problem, Thompson has it all from her resume. The same resume found from the simple google search done earlier. Then came a stumbling block - the college wanted her birthday. But he only had a rough idea of her age, no actual birth date.

5)    State traffic court web site: Apparently you can search for violations and court appearances by name! And such records include a birth date. (Facebook also makes this piece of data very easy to get even if people do not note their birth year…remember Thompson knew roughly how old Kim was.) Thompson he had no luck with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

6)    Thompson goes back to the blog and does a search for “birthday.” He gets a date but no year.

7)    Finally, Thompson attempts the college reset password again. He fills in her birth date, and simply guesses the year. He gets it wrong. But the site gives him five chances, and tells him which field has the error. So he continues to guess. He gets access in under five guesses. He changes her college password. This gives him access to her gmail password reset email. Google requires some personal information which he is able to get easily from her blog, e.g., father’s middle name. Thompson changes the gmail password and that gives him access to the bank account reset password email. Here again he is asked for personal information but nothing that he could not learn from Kim’s blog, e.g., pet name and phone number. He resets the bank password and bingo; he has immediate access to all her records and money.

From Thompson:

Needless to say, Kim was disturbed. Her whole digital ID sat precariously on the foundation of her college e-mail account; once I had access to it, the rest of the security defenses fell like a row of dominoes. What’s striking about Kim’s case is how common it is. For many of us, the abundance of personal information we put online combined with the popular model of sending a password reset e-mail has our online security unsteadily resting on the shoulders of one or two e-mail accounts.

In this case, the personal information came from her blog, but it could have easily come from a Facebook page or other online community pages.

Thompson provides good advice on Scientific American:

Go and do a self-check. Try to reset your passwords and see what questions are asked to verify your identity. Some questions are better than others. Date of birth, for example, is bad. In addition to the DMV, there are a wealth of public records available online where folks can track down when you were born. Most account reset features give you a choice of questions or methods to use. Go for questions that ask about obscure things that you won’t forget (or can at least look up), like your favorite frequent flyer number. Avoid questions that are easy to guess, such as  – in which state did you open your bank account?

It’s also critical to remember that once you put data online, it’s almost impossible to delete it later. The more you blog about yourself, the more details you put in your social networking profiles, the more information about you is being archived, copied, backed up, and analyzed almost immediately. Think first, post later.

Read story@ smartplanet

I am always shocked at how much personal information people are willing to share on their social sites, but seriously, this is definitely a case of TMI (too much information).

An 18-year-old Pittsburgh man is accused of burglarizing a market with three teens, then posting pictures on his Facebook page showing the suspects posing with some of the loot.

Isaiah Cutler has been in jail since last Friday for the Dec. 12th burglary.

Police say 17-year old Cutler and two 14-year-olds stole more than $8,000 worth of cash, cigarettes, candy, and checks from the business. About an hour later, police say, Cutler posted pictures of the teens posing with the loot on his page on the social networking site.

Well, I guess they’re just stupid kids,” Detective Valerie Milie said Monday. “They thought they could put (the pictures) out there for their friends who friended them on Facebook to see. But the one kid had 200 friends, but not only were they friends, some of them were relatives who became concerned and called police.”

Police were already tracking down the teens based on the Facebook photos and the surveillance video from the store by the time the parents determined what happened, Milie said.

The younger suspects have been charged in juvenile court and have been released to their parents.

Cutler faced a preliminary hearing yesterday on charges of theft, burglary and conspiracy.

Sources: MSNBC, CBS News