30-year-old Zachary Joshua Reader, a former high school teacher and baseball coach at schools in both Anaheim and Irvine, California, is accused of encouraging sex acts and possessing nude photographs of boys aged 13-17.

According to police, Reeder used Facebook to commit his crimes. Between June of 2010 and January of 2013, he allegedly created a fake Facebook account posing as a female student. Through this account, Reeder befriended many underage boys, most of which he knew through his teaching jobs.

He reportedly got at least 106 victims to send him sexually explicit photos and videos.

Here’s the full list of counts that Reeder faces:

22 felony counts of using a minor for sex acts, 15 felony counts of distributing pornography to a minor, 13 felony counts of contacting a child with the intent to commit a lewd act, six felony counts of lewd acts upon a child, two felony counts of lewd acts upon a child under 14, one felony count of possession and control of child pornography, and one felony count of distribution of child pornography.

These counts carry a total maximum sentence of 44 years in prison.

This definitely isn’t the first time that we’ve seen Facebook used in elaborate fake profile sex scams. Last year, a Pennsylvania man was charged with 68 felony counts after he went to painstaking lengths to manipulate underage girls through a series of fake Facebook accounts.

We first told you about this case back in November of 2011 when the Beasley and his then-16-year-old accomplice were arrested and charged with the murders.

As the story goes, a South Carolina man answered a Craigslist ad for a general labor job on a 700-acre cattle farm in Noble county, Ohio. He said that he was told he’d be living on the farm, and thus was instructed to bring all of his belongings with him. When he arrived, two men led him into the woods and pointed a gun at his head. He managed to escape, but was clipped in the arm while fleeing.

This led police to uncover the scheme, which they said involved Beasley and his accomplice placing phony Craigslist ads offering jobs to out-of-work laborers. The goal was to bring unsuspecting workers out to their farm, where they would rob and kill them.

Police first uncovered one shallow grave filled with a body. Suspecting more victims, police eventually found the evidence to charge Beasley and his accomplice with multiple homicides.

Beasley has been found guilty on all counts, including aggravated murder, aggravated attempted murder, aggravated robbery, grand and petty theft and ID theft.

His younger accomplice, 18-year-old Brogan Rafferty, was tried and sentenced last November to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Beasley, a former preacher, will be sentenced on March 20th. The death penalty will be considered.

This one should immediately throw up some red flags, considering that the scammers can’t even spell “Zuckerberg” correctly. A new phishing scam making its way around Facebook is just a new riff on a classic ruse.

Hoax Slayer is reporting a message hitting some users’ inboxes claims to be from “Mark Zurckerberg” and states that…

Mark Zurckerberg

Dear Facebook user, After reviewing your page activity, it was determined that you were in violation of our Terms of service.Your account might be permanently suspended.

If you think this is a mistake,please verify your account on the link below.This would indicate that your Page does not have a violation on our Terms of Service.

We will immediately review your account activity,and we will notify you again via email.
Verify your account at the link below:

Clicking on the link will direct users to a fake Facebook login page. Although made to look like the real Facebook login page, this malicious site will simply steal your info once you enter it in.

This type account verification scam is old, but persistent. Most claim that the user has violated some Facebook terms and must verify their account in order to keep it from being suspended. In the past couple of months, we’ve seen a couple variations of this scam hit Facebook. One version purported to come from the Facebook Security Team. Another scam message claimed that users had been “annoying or insulting” to other users and that they face account suspension. Both of those scams, like this “Zurckerberg” one, asked for personal info to “verify” the accounts.

Sophos Naked Security blog tips us to a new type of a very classic style of Facebook scam – the celebrity sex tape. This time it involves Rihanna.

What’s a little different about this one is that it hides inside an event: [VIDEO] RIHANNA SEX TAPE. Once you access the actual event page, you’ll be met with the text “I lost all respect for her after watching this” and a y.ahoo.it link. Don’t click it.

Rihanna isn’t the only celebrity with a recent sex tape scam on Facebook. Earlier this month, a viral scam made the rounds suggesting that Taylor Swift’s iPhone had been hacked and a sex tape had been leaked. Clicking on the provided link directed curious Facebookers to an online survey scam that phished for users’ personal info.

As always, be vigilant. And don’t let your curiosity cloud your better judgment.

Hoax-Slayer first spotted the hoax. Here’s the message that some users are seeing:

It’s official. Communication media. FACEBOOK has just published its price. fee of $? ($ 9.99), to become a member of “gold” and keep your privacy as it is. If you paste this on your wall will be completely free. Otherwise, tomorrow all your documents can become public. Even those messages that you have deleted or photos that you have not authorized …… not cost you anything, copy and paste

Of course, there’s the part at the end about simply sharing the status in order to make all the problems go away. That’s the number one mechanism that scammers use to spread viral hoaxes on any social network – because how hard is it to just copy and paste it, you know, just in case?

In reality, this hoax isn’t exactly new. It’s a mashup of a couple different hoaxes that have been floating around for years. First, there’s the Facebook “Gold” scam. Hoaxes suggesting that Facebook will soon make people pay to use the service have been going around for years, and the particular one involving a $9.99 Gold membership was spotted as early as 2010.

This has the added bonus of a privacy scare, suggesting that users must pay or share a status in order to avoid public humiliation. Privacy on Facebook is a scary subject for many users, so this simply plays into some people’s base fears.

Another Facebook hoax currently making the rounds implies that users could be lock up in “Facebook Jail” if they send too many friend requests that get rejected. There is a tiny bit of truth to this hoax, in that Facebook will temporarily suspend your friend-requesting abilities if you send out too many unfulfilled requests. But the hoax suggests that this could lead to a sudden and irreversible termination of your whole account, which is simply untrue.

As always, if it sounds ridiculous, it is ridiculous. Facebook is never going to make you pay to use the service and they are never going to make all of your private information public – at least not on their terms.

That’s the simple message behind a press release just issued by the government agency. They were forced to put out this release because many residents in the state of Mississippi have received a scam email which claims to be from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The FBI says that they don’t send out these types of emails and that clicking on any embedded link could result malware, phishing, or any number of headaches.

Here’s what the email in question looks like:

From: FBI ALERT

Date: February 2, 2013, 5:47:06 p.m. CST

To: undisclosed-recipients:;

Reply-To: FBI ALERT

We have an information for you regarding the person you are transacting with online. You need to see this yourself. Contact us immediately for this is very important to you. Keep it to yourself and contact us, get back to us immediately. There is something you need to know about this person or you might end up loosing everything you ever worked for. Stop e-mailing until you hear from us. Contact FBI secret service with the e-mail below fbisecretservice@careceo.com FBI secret service.

Other than the fact that it sounds like total horsecrap, you should be tipped off by the ibgen.com.br address. And what the hell is the FBI secret service?

Anyway, the advice here is the same as with any scam email. Don’t reply with any personal information and don’t click anything. That’s the surest way to maintain your safety.

And in the future, know that the FBI will never send you unsolicited emails. It’s that simple.

[FBI via Forbes]

But if you run across a Twitter profile claiming to offer quick and easy verifications if you only retweet their posts, don’t fall for it.

The Verge ran a story on a particular bogus Twitter account, @PrivateVerified, that had amassed over 22,000 followers in less than a day. How did it become so popular? Simple – by asking users to follow and retweet in order to receive verification.

That account was quickly suspended, but it led to readers finding tons of other fraudulent accounts that promised verification. It’s kind of an epidemic, actually. Take for instance @VerifiedTwitter, @requestVerified and @NextVerified, all of which has thousands of followers but are now shut down.

Of course, these types of accounts keep popping up in place of the ones Twitter catches onto. It’s like a giant game of whack-a-mole. Take @freeverifiying for instance, which has over 16,000 followers.

Follow @FreeVerifying

Verified Accounts
@FreeVerifying

RT this if you want to get verified in the next hour or so!

 Reply  ·  Retweet  ·  Favorite
2 minutes ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

Don’t do it. They can’t verify you. No. Don’t click it. What are you doing. Dont. Stahp.

Here’s what Twitter has to say about the verification process:

Twitter proactively verifies accounts on an ongoing basis to make it easier for users to find who they’re looking for. We concentrate on highly sought users in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, advertising, business, and other key interest areas. We verify business partners from time to time and individuals at high risk of impersonation.

We do not accept requests for verification from the general public. If you fall under one of the above categories and your Twitter account meets our qualifications for verification, we may reach out to you in the future.

Twitter is not going to ask you for retweets in order to verify your account. Twitter is especially not going to ask you for retweets from a non-verified account in order to verify your account (all of these bogus accounts are un-verified themselves).

There is one real Twitter account dealing with verified accounts, however. It’s @verified and yes, it’s verified by Twitter. Although it has over 730,000 followers, it hasn’t tweeted since August. And even though it’s an official Twitter account, it never offered quick verifications to anyone – it simply tweeted out helpful links.

The latest scam to hit the network comes in the form of messages sent to users’ inboxes. These are not simply spam messages that will get caught up in that “other” inbox that Facebook reserves for non-important communications. These messages may come from compromised accounts, ones that could be given access to your inbox.

If you receive one of these scam messages, it’ll look like this:

WARNING: Your account is reported to have violated the policies that are considered annoying or insulting Facebook users.system will disable your account within 24 hours if you do not do the reconfirmation. Please confirm your Facebook account below:

If the ridiculous assertion that you’ve “annoyed users” doesn’t immediately throw you off, there’s a link.

Upon clicking, a page will prompt users to enter their Facebook account info and password. It then asks you to confirm which webmail service you use to sign-in to Facebook (getting more suspicious). Finally, it drops the big request – your credit card info. At this point, you should definitely realize you’ve been duped and stop entering information.

This scam is similar to another one we reported on earlier this month that also involved private messages from “The Facebook Security Team.” Except we all know that the real Facebook Security team doesn’t send out messages to specific users asking them to verify account details. Both scams warn users that their accounts may be suspended for some sort of unspecified violation of the terms of service.

[GFI via The Next Web]

It’s the latest phishing attack on the network, which sees its fair share of such deceptions. Some users are currently receiving messages from pages called Security Team, which ask users to verify their accounts via outside link or face an account suspension.

Here’s what the scam message looks like, courtesy Facecrooks:

As you can see, the scammers use the same logo that the real Facebook Security page uses, hoping that it will give the message more credibility with users. It’s also grammatically well constructed (for the most part), something we can’t say for most phishing scams that hit Facebook.

But the link that it contains should tip you to its illegitimacy. It uses Facebook’s app’s domain to link users to a page asking for their page name, phone number, and password.

A quick search on Facebook yields dozens of pages for “Security Team,” all using the official Facebook Security logo and all created in the last couple of weeks. These pages, as obvious scam attempts, should be removed fairly soon. But others will always pop up in their place. Always be vigilant.

In a blog post written for The Huffington Post, Daniels explains why he decided to start the now-legendary hoax:

“I myself have never shared or liked anything for that reason and I’ve never asked others to share or like something. Then Nov. 29, 2012, came around and I came home from work and saw people sharing a photo of a man holding a digitally manipulated photo of winning Powerball numbers to the biggest Powerball drawing that was all over the news. In the description he said that a book inspired him to pick the winning numbers and he attached a link to where you could purchase the book.

It was obvious to me that this person was gaining something monetary for sharing that link so people could purchase this book. I was amazed at my friends who were sharing it so I decided to do it myself and see who’d fall for it. I quickly snapped a photo and spent 15 minutes moving the numbers to look like winning numbers. I knew they were out of order and that the remaining winner had a 10-pick ticket, but I also knew that would add to my curiosity of who reads the news and does their research before clicking a button.”

He said that the photo received over 400,000 shares in 18 hours, and over two million within three days. He definitely wasn’t the only one perpetrating a powerball hoax, but he was definitely the most successful.

He also says that the fact that he didn’t try to promote anything with his hoax, and that led to its credibility.

The sad part about this “social experiment” is that he apparently received thousands of messages from people, many of which had sad stories to tell about how they needed the money.

“There are not too many positives that can come from a hoax or scam but hopefully with my story I can try and turn a negative into a positive. A viral hoax can give a person like myself 15 minutes of fame and rather than attempt to exploit or profit from the situation, I can instead try to help a stranger,” he says.

With that in mind, he’s using his 15 minutes to raise money for one of the people that sent him a private message, a mother with a 6-figure medical debt.

All forgiven? A harmless social experiment? Douchebag move? What do you think?