Facebook photo of a pile of cash leads to home invasion

Online security issues are usually no less severe than losing your Diablo III loot, however here’s a much more corporeal example: a house in Australia has been broken into in direct response to a photograph of “a large sum of cash” being posted to a 17-year-old girl’s Facebook account. The teenager was assisting her grandmother in counting her savings and snapped a photo of the money all piled up, which she shared to her Facebook account around 4PM local time on Thursday. At about 11:30PM the same day, a pair of masked men forced their way into her mother’s home — likely the address the girl had listed on her Facebook profile — demanding the money they saw on her social page. After rifling through the home sufficiently to be convinced that it wasn’t there, they made off with a small sum of cash and other possessions.

Though no one was hurt, the entire unfortunate incident could perhaps have been prevented by the girl employing Facebook’s privacy features more proactively — and her own common sense in not sharing pictures of money stacked up ready to be stolen. As the New South Wales police report advises, users of social media should “take extreme caution when posting photographs and personal information.”