Facebook Denies Involvement in $200,000 Worth of New Hampshire Burglaries

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Should you watch what you post on Facebook? Yes and no. A recent report from WMUR suggests that three men located around the town of Nashua, New Hampshire used Facebook updates from area residents to target homes to burglarize.

 

According to the site, Mario Rojas, Leonardo Barroso, and Victor Rodriguez were able to pilfer more than $200,000 worth of personal property by scanning Facebook for updates from local residents that detailed their upcoming travel plans. This allegedly gave all three men the perfect window of opportunity for breaking into residents' houses, as they had an exact confirmation for when the homes would be left unguarded.

 

If this sounds anything like a real-life version of the once-popular "Please Rob Me" site, it sort-of is. For the uninitiated, Pleaserobme.com was a site that would automatically aggregate Twitter messages from users regarding the same topics as those listed above: vacation notices, automatic check-ins at locations that weren't one's home, et cetera.

 

The site would then list these updates into categories like, "recent empty homes" or "new opportunities," under the pretense that such over-sharing of one's personal life would make it rather easy for others to take advantage of the information.

 

However, if this story sounds almost too fortuitous on behalf of the accused, it might very well be. For starters, Facebook itself is denying that there's any connection between said burglaries and the social networking platform.

 

"We've been in contact with the Nashua police, and they confirmed that they while they have an ongoing investigation and have already made a number of arrests, the only Facebook link was that one of those arrested had a Facebook friend who posted about leaving town in the near future (which is why they believe that home was targeted) and it had nothing to do with Facebook Places," said a Facebook spokesman in an email interview with Cnet's Caroline McCarthy.

 

"The police confirmed that the other burglaries had nothing to do with Facebook altogether," he added.

 

As well, there's the simple fact of the matter that the burglary victims—more than 50 in total—would not only all have to have kept their profile information as public as it can be, but they would also have needed to list and share their full addresses in their profile information. The former certainly seems feasible and expected of most social network users, but just how many people go about posting their exact address online for the entire world to see?

 

That said, Facebook does work the other way too—in September 2009, a home burglar robbed a house in West Virginia and made off with two diamond rings valued at more than $3,500. He was caught as a direct result of logging into his own Facebook page during the crime to check his profile… which he conveniently left logged-in and on the screen for said homeowners to return to.