According to the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) Lower Saxony is currently rampant a particularly perfidious scam: The Facebook account of those affected is hacked or the access data is captured via phishing. That’s annoying enough, but you could probably get over it in many cases. The cybercriminals then post child pornography under the banner of the hijacked accounts.
Of course, Meta reacts quickly to such incidents and blocks the infiltrated accounts – access is then no longer possible for you, but also for the criminals. It gets a little thicker: Facebook is required by US federal law to forward criminally relevant facts to the semi-governmental National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). If there are cases abroad, the NCMEC then forwards the information to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), which brings us back to Germany. The BKA, in turn, prepares the information and sends it to the authorities in the federal state in which the original account holders live.
For example, the LKA Lower Saxony would be responsible for Lower Saxony, which draws attention to the whole misery. For the affected account holders, this means that the police have been informed of a criminal offense (possession or distribution of child or youth pornography). You will then be formally recorded as a suspect in criminal proceedings because the content was distributed via your account.
The LKA is now reassuring a little: The responsible public prosecutor’s office usually closes such cases afterwards, since the account holders concerned have not contributed to the crime. Nevertheless, in case of doubt, this can be or become uncomfortable for you. In the last four months, a number of such cases in the mid three-digit range have been identified and processed, according to the LKA Lower Saxony.
Now one may ask oneself what the perpetrators want to achieve at all? The LKA Lower Saxony is still speculating here. It is possible that people’s reputations are to be damaged in a targeted manner. But extortion demands made before or after the crimes are also conceivable. what you can do Watch out for suspicious e-mails, use two-factor authentication and immediately file a complaint (suspicion of spying on data according to § 202a StGB), if you have already been hit. Also inform the less tech-savvy people in your circle of acquaintances about the mentioned scam.
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