If you’ve got $45 burning a hole in your special black market fund and have a hankering for a bundle of 1,000 stolen or fake Facebook accounts, you might want to talk to your friendly neighborhood social networking pirate.

The New York Times reports a hacker was selling 1.5 million Facebook accounts in February.

From the story:

Criminals steal log-in data for Facebook accounts, typically with “phishing” techniques that tricks users into disclosing their passwords or with malware that logs keystrokes. They then use the accounts to send spam, distribute malicious programs and run identity and other fraud.

Facebook tells the Times it doubts the hacker actually had that many accounts for sale.

The company attempted to purchase accounts as part of its investigation into the incident, said a spokesman, Barry Schnitt. However, “the hacker was unable to produce anything for our buyer,” he said.

Why would anyone want a Facebook account? Apparently people trust their Facebook friends far more than friends on other social networking sites and are more likely to fall for scams that seem to come from them.

Stolen Facebook Accounts for Sale [New York Times]
(Thanks, Phillip!)

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