Mal FaircloughSHE has no idea who they were or why they would target her but Sasha Mathers feels violated by Facebook hackers.
The mother of two was on a family holiday in Bali when she was woken by an early morning phone call from her sister telling her that hackers had hijacked her Facebook account.
The hackers used her account to contact her stepbrother Joel Stupka to tell him she and her family had been kidnapped at gunpoint and needed money for their release. When Joel asked how much money, the hackers replied: "How much have you got?"
Mr Stupka realised something was wrong when the hackers told him Ms Mathers's "cell phone" had been stolen. He knew cell phone was the American term for a mobile phone.
Ms Mathers, from Box Hill in Melbourne, had become one of a growing number of Australians targeted by Facebook hackers. Hackers have also been attacking Facebook memorial pages.
An Australian Federal Police spokesman said not every case was reported to police so it was difficult to number the people who had had their Facebook accounts hijacked.
Police were so concerned about hackers that that they were negotiating with Facebook over the website providing a law-enforcement liaison officer to Australia, placing a “report abuse” button on each profile page and improving privacy settings.
The spokesman said Facebook had launched a help centre last year which provided advice on how users could protect their security and deal with any issues related to their Facebook use. This includes tips on how to effectively administer a page or group and advice on how to restore an account if it has been compromised.
Latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that 499,500 people in Australia were victims of identity fraud in 2007, a crime which includes illegally appropriating another person's identity for unauthorised gain. The figures do not give a break down on how many of these victims were defrauded on Facebook.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Scamwatch spokeswoman, Lin Enright, said as more people used social networking sites, more members were being scammed.
"People are increasingly becoming targeted and need to be extraordinarily careful about the sort of information they disclose. We have had instances of people putting bank details and home addresses on these sites," Ms Enright said.
A Facebook spokeswoman said the site was concerned about any potential security threat posed by hackers and took the issue seriously.
"Our team has analysed the trends of these attacks and is using this information to surface compromised accounts before the scammers get very far. When we find these accounts, we disable them and attempt to get them back to their rightful owner."
In the case of Ms Mathers, her brother-in-law tried to keep the hackers online to cut and paste the transcript of their conversation, but they soon realised what he was doing and deleted him as her Facebook friend.
Mr Stupka contacted Ms Mathers's sister Kim, who rang her hotel room at 7am Bali time on Wednesday, January 12, to tell her that her Facebook identity had been hijacked.
Ms Mathers, on holidays with her husband Grant, and children Jana, 6, and Sam, 7, had used the hotel's computer the previous night to go on Facebook.
Thinking she had forgotten to log off from her Facebook page under her maiden name Greenwood, she ran through the lobby of the Hotel Tjampuhan in Ubud in her nightgown to check.
Hotel management, however, assured her she had logged off and the problem wasn't with their computer, but a virus on Facebook.
"I felt someone had access to my life and I was really quite worried. I didn't know what to do."
