Facebook utilised for bank account hack
A fraudster has been jailed for 15 months after being found guilty of defrauding his neighbours after using personal information from social networking sites such as Facebook and Friends Reunited in order to guess the security questions to their online bank accounts.
Iain Wood netted himself more than £35k over two years from the ploy in order to fuel his gambling habit before being caught.
Working out passwords for up to 18 hours a day from his block of flats in Newcastle his scheming ways were described by judge Guy Whitburn as “well planned, complex and clever.”
Wood was only caught after he brazenly transferred money directly from a neighbours account into his own. That led police to a stash of passports, bills and other paperwork which he had pilfered from his neighbours postboxes.
From June 2008 to June 2010 Wood assumed the identity of his neighbours by claiming to forget his online password, he would then answer security questions based on dates of births and mothers maiden names from his haul of snatched mail and social networking site data.