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Interesting. I guess I still think of social media as nothing more than goofy, leisure time activities. Hard for me to think of it as associated with fraud or a

• sp332 9y ago
  Well it can be pretty personal. Plus they changed his profile picture to something intentionally damaging. If you log in as someone else, you get access to their private messages. You can send messages or make posts as them or delete old ones. You can see a history of where and when they logged in. You get access to photos and posts they haven't made completely public. Anyway if you're not lucky enough to have friends and customers physically nearby, social media could be your only connection to close friends or critical business contacts. Messing with that could really make someone's life difficult.
• simplicio 9y ago
  Eh, accessing someone else's facebook to post mischievous posts seems to be a near universal prank amongst US teenagers, and I've never heard of the Feds taking an interest. Seems like its one of those things that's technically illegal, but is unlikely to draw any actual legal action unless done in the service of some more serious offense. (plus, I'm pretty sure fraud requires an intent to deceive. Given that the woman told a journalist what she was up to, it seems it would be hard to prove that she was trying to make people think she was actually the owner of the facebook account.)
  • sp332 9y ago
    The fraud in this case would be to Facebook, because she is pretending to be the other user. I'd be surprised in this case if Facebook took legal action against her, but they might ban her from the platform.
    • snowwrestler 9y ago
      Ok but that's pretty far from a federal offense.
      • sp332 9y ago
        If they can prove that she caused damage or obtained anything of value, it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#Criminal_offenses_under_the_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#C...
    • pcl 9y ago
      Is there any case law on this? In particular, I wonder what establishes ownership of an account. For example, I know people who share email accounts. How does the law distinguish the two cases? If Alice were to go after Bob for logging in with credentials to an account she created, things seem pretty simple. But it seems difficult for Facebook to determine whether Alice and Bob are ok with a shared account or not. And even more so for the government to determine if it's ok for Bob to use those credentials.
      • c22 9y ago
        Facebook doesn't have to determine whether Bob and Alice are okay sharing an account because doing so is already expressly prohibited by their terms of service[0]: > "You will not share your password (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account." [0]: https://www.facebook.com/terms.php https://www.facebook.com/terms.php
        • pcl 9y ago
          Well, sure, but fraud is a criminal charge, not a ToS violation.
• Gargoyle 9y ago
  You're focusing on the social media part, the illegal part is circumventing security with a stolen password.
  • itronitron 9y ago
    If someone writes their password in a book and leaves that book in your vehicle which they stole from you then I wouldn't really consider the password 'stolen'