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Wasil Dhingra doesn't set his Facebook settings to 'private' or 'friends only.' So, it's not hard to find his phone number.
A quick search also revealed his address. But the phone number is the prize, because now it is a simple matter to set up a premium service or a texting service scam. That could get expensive for Dhingra.
Discovery News reached out to Dhingra, a postgraduate student at the Nottingham business school in the U.K., as well as a number of other people, whose profiles and habits appeared on the site called weknowwhatyouredoing.com. Dhingra, like many others out there, was not aware his profile was so public. He added that he's been on Facebook long enough that he can't even remember when he set the page up or looked at his settings. He was planning on setting his page to private.
The site weknowwhatyouredoing.com is not unlike others such as pleaserobme.com, which track Facebook users using information that is publicly available. weknowwhatyouredoing.com does a simple text search in the Facebook postings which can also filter out people and look for specific keywords such as hung over" or "new phone number."
Some people also, of course, post their phone numbers. And that is where scammers could step in and rob you of your own money by setting you up with premium services since all that is needed to set up an account for many of those services and text message scams is your number.
While it's important to manage one's privacy settings, part of the problem is the way Facebook is designed. The default setting for an account is to have everything be public.
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