Ya gotta admire the genius of this, though the tactics are pretty underhanded and scummy. Just when you think you’re seen all the tricks of the trade, debt collectors come up with a new way to find debtors they say owe them money. The latest: debt collectors create a Facebook profile, use a picture of a cute chick as a profile pic, and ask to be your friend.

Once you accept them, any of your personal information you share with friends becomes available: date of birth, phone number, email and address. They then use the info on your profile to start bugging you for money the collection agencies say you owe them. They can even post embarrassing information on your profile.

This latest news may add to the panic about social networking sites. Many people hear about virus, spammers, etc which run wild on MySpace and Facebook and overreact to such reports by cancelling or deleting their profiles. This is unnecessary. My advice for Facebook users who want to avoid debt collectors would be the same for anyone using a Social Networking site: keep all information private or only allow your friends access. Here are some tips to control your privacy settings on Facebook:

• Set all information to private in the admin panel.
• Create one profile for friends and another one for professional uses. Employers do look at Facebook and Myspace pages.
• Only accept someone you actually know. This can be tough for people who like to show off how popular they are by having 1000 friends. I can’t imagine trying to look at their wall. If you don’t understand that last sentence, then you’re not on facebook and this article is irrelevant to you.
• Remove your Facebook from search engine results.
• Set all Photo/Video Tags to Private
• Make sure all of your photo albums are set to “private”.

For more info on how to set privacy on Facebook – here’s a great article. If you have other ideas – leave a comment!

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