You’re all educated, gorgeous people so you are fully aware that shares in Facebook won’t be publicly available for several more weeks. But that didn’t stop a woman in Wisconsin from using fake stock in the website to pay for home repairs — she even gave some to her daughter for Christmas.

When the couldn’t pay a contractor for the $18,000 worth of work he’d done on her house, she told him she’d somehow managed to get her hands on $1 million in Facebook stock. So he took $18K worth of shares as payment — and then invested another $10,000 in completely fictional stock.

“I think it’s a great opportunity, it’s a growing business so on and so forth,” the victim said regarding his thoughts on investing in Facebook. “I’m interested in my options and investments so you don’t have to work as hard and make it a lot easier money for my kids and family.”

But when it all began to smell fishy — because the mere idea of a woman who can’t pay you $18,000 just happening to have $1 million worth of stock in a then-private business didn’t immediately strike him as odd — he asked the police to investigate.

As the authorities looked into the scam, they found that the woman had hoodwinked others into taking Facebook stock as payment, and that she’d gifted a bunch of it to her daughter this past holiday season.

Woman accused in Facebook stock scam: fox11online.com

Woman accused in Facebook stock scam [Fox 11]

Thanks to Anti for the tip!

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