As mentioned by the BBC News recently, a 17-year-old girl was visiting her grandmother in Sydney, Australia when she took a picture of a ”large sum of cash” while helping her grandmother count her cash savings at the home. The teenager posted the picture on her Facebook feed around 4 p.m. on Thursday May 24. Approximately seven hours later, two masked men armed with a wooden club and a knife entered the girl’s family home 75 miles away in the town of Bundanoon. Upon entering the family home, the men found the 47-year-old mother of the girl as well as a 58-year-old man and 14-year-old boy, likely her father and brother.
When speaking to the family, the two men wanted to talk to the girl about the sum of money in the picture that was posted on Facebook. After the girl’s mother convinced the two armed men that her daughter no longer lived at the address, they “took a small amount of cash and other personal property before leaving the house” according to the official police statement regarding the incident.
While no one was injured during the robbery, it’s clear that the two men were able to determine the location of the home from information posted on the teenage girl’s Facebook account. It’s also possible that at least one of the two men were friends with the girl on Facebook and were aware of the location of her family’s home.
Also within the official statement, the police reminded the public to be careful of the type of information that’s posted on social networks like Facebook. With the rise in popularity of geotagging photos with location data prior to posting on a social network, Facebook users may want to use groups to limit the amount of sharing among their entire friend’s list and avoid using public posts when publishing personal information or location data.
clever girl :(
Why would this be a sponsored ad? Who would pay to repeat this story..
Amazing!
Why would this be a sponsored ad? Who would pay to repeat this story..
dont talk about money on here.
Camera phones with GPS capability might include the coordinates of the location in a tag field of the digital photo. It’s best to disable that feature if you consider posting it later. Alternatively, there is SW that can strip this type of data from the image file.
good point…..
Another generation of Einsteins.
Lazy and/or careless to add a file photo of American cash when this happened on the other side of the planet.
Probably because its the only currency you can spend anywhere in the world.
So the police should post pictures like this, and stories that the only people around are a couple of kids who found their parents cash stash, and sit back and wait for the vultures. Excessive force leading to death is recommended.
Mexigogue likes this story.
Teenage girls added to facebook added to posting photos unsupervised equals TOTAL disaster, case in point. This girl has the IQ of a grapefruit.
you clearly underestimate the IQ of a grapefruit!
This is something everyone should go over with children – but they don’t. Don’t brag and don’t disclose information that can cost you and teach kids how they can unintentionally leak information out I bought an 11-year old nephew a saxophone that was made in 1984 and has it’s share of marching band scratches, but is so good it’s worth $1000. Since most of the sax kids in his school band have cheap $295-$595 thin Chinese-made junk or rent ($71/month!), one of the first things I did after spending $450 to have all the keys re-padded was to tell him to never brag about how good his sax is or he may find it missing if it ever has to be left in the band room. You can’t assume kids will realize this – especially when their first thoughts are, “I can’t wait to tell my friends what good thing I got!” Similarly, this week I sent out 25 photos by email of the home my sister’s family just bought and I screened them to make sure nothing private (like keys on a peg somewhere) was showing.