Today I decided to go fishing for Facebook scams.

But like, any good fisherman, I had to have the equipment.

First and foremost, I had to have a Facebook account — the metaphorical worm all the hackers would presumably come swimming up to. Of course, it couldn’t be my own — I certainly don’t want a group of Indonesian hackers to know what kind of dog my best friend had, among other, more sensitive information.

So I created one. A Mr. Edward Martrain, one who was lucky enough to get the email emartrain@gmail.com. I also made a Facebook account for him. Unfortunately he doesn’t have any friends yet (you guys should totally make fake friends for him so he isn’t lonely).

Poor, lonely Edward.

Next, I needed some additional sort of protection — some shell that protects my actual computer from malicious attacks. So I booted up Virtual Box and created a virtual pc, and installed Windows XP. I now had a nice little sandbox to freely test out the various tricks the would be Facebook con-artists might pull on me.

Lastly, I had to protect my IP address, just in case. This was easy enough — I simply used Tor (a Acronym for The Onion Router) — and simply hid my IP address. Now this is a program journalists and revolutionaries utilized throughout the world in order to stay anonymous  so I felt pretty safe.

This ip is supposedly in the middle of the ocean. Pretty cool.

Now, I can try out my newfound power. Edward Martrain immediately liked and started using the app “Indian Hackers & Hacking 2010.” The 3k monthly users just became 3001.

Wow, someone is interested in Edward!

Other than a suspicious amount of page reloading and app hits, everything seemed great!

Now I’m ready for big project. Come and suggest them.