According to a report from Legal & General - the Digital Criminal 2012 - CyberSafety Report almost a third (29%) of social media users only update their Facebook status or tweet when they want their friends to know what they are up to. Over half have discussed an event, holiday plans or evening out on Facebook or Twitter. Facebraggers will post photographs of their latest acquisitions that they have not actually bought or check in to luxury establishments without actually having been there to make it look as if they have a slightly more interesting life than they do.

For burglars, it can be very interesting information, especially if they then know when you are out so they can go take a look. As Michael Fraser, the reformed burglar who stars in the BBC’s Beat the Burglar' "they are putting their homes seriously at risk because burglars can see from their profile what they have purchased recently, what possessions they have in their home, and when they will next be out of the house in order to pay their home a timely visit."

Over nine out of ten social media users (91%) have received a request to connect online with someone they have never met in person, and over half (51%) have accepted - on Facebook that figure is 42% acceptance right and users there say that only 59% of their friends are people they actually know well. So, if you think that the average Facebook user has 160 friends, that's actually 66 strangers who are viewing their daily doings.

In fact, a quarter of social media users generally said they wouldn't be surprised if a Facebook friend was not who they said they were and a third thinking that some of their connections might have a criminal record. 73% said they wouldn't trust all their friends with a secret - and yet they persist in putting up all sorts of personal information. 21% wouldn't recognise all their friends in the street and 25% wouldn't know them in a criminal line up!

On LinkedIn, it's even worse with almost two thirds (62%) of their total connections being people they have never met.

Back to Michael Fraser again, who warns “While people are becoming savvier about privacy settings on social networks, they can also develop a false sense of security with their online connections, wrongly believing they can trust all those so-called ‘friends’. By turning a blind eye, people can unwittingly expose a wealth of personal information – a real goldmine for burglars. Digital criminals know how to spot easy targets - for example, someone with over 500 friends on Facebook is very unlikely to know all those people personally and will therefore be much more likely to accept a stranger’s friend request. By befriending a number of the target user’s other friends beforehand, the victim is even more likely to accept the fake friend, inadvertently giving the burglar access to all their personal information.”

Mutual Friends

And, what they don't realise is that digital criminals have developed a new technique where they use fake profiles to befriend our friends and, with the knowledge that we are more likely to accept a friendship request from someone who is also the friend of a friend, they then ask to be our friends.

So, digital criminals create fake personal profiles who look exciting and they start befriending people with the explicit objective of honing in on a vulnerable victim.

A very sad 17% said that they accepted people they did not know just to increase the number of friends they had on Facebook but the majority said it was because they were friends of someone else that they knew or that they were in the same group or playing the same game.

Home Security and Social Media

Legal & General advise that, for personal safety on Facebook and other social media platforms, you should

• • check your privacy settings so that friends of friends cannot see your updates and check which applications you have accepted can access your private data.
  • Don't accept friend requests on Facebook or connection requests on LinkedIn and Twitter from people you have never met.
  • Limit what you publish when it comes to personal info like date of birth, gender, address, telephone number and don't talk about your holiday or weekend plans or highlight new purchases.

Having proper cover on your contents insurance is important but an even better deterrent would be a professionally fitted house alarm and door entry system to deter any potential thieves. If you don't know them, don't let them in!

Speak to our team today

Our team are ready to take your call and assist you further with any security concerns that you may have. For a FREE home security survey, please get in touch with our Kent or London team today.