How a Facebook scam leads to a Chinese email harvesting site - and back again

Reports of your friends - and everyone else's friends - being adrift in a war-torn place where strangely enough they can somehow manage is to update their Facebook status to say "Send money!" are exaggerated.

But Facebook has a problem: "Nigerian scammers" - by which we mean scammers of any nationality, but aiming to get money off you by conning you - have infiltrated it and are breaking into accounts, and using them to send messages pleading for money.

And of course because it appears to come from a friend, people are more likely to believe it.

This isn't new - there have been dozens of scams around, and there was a similar problem on MySpace.

But Trend Micro tells us about a scam where you can follow the whole thread, from innocent email to innocent site to email harvesting to cybercrime. We'll let Trend Micro take up the story......