How one little mistake exposed Nigeria’s socialite, Hushpuppi’s source of wealth and why we all should be worried.
FYI, this piece isn’t completely about Hushpuppi, it’s more about your cyber safety.
If you follow handles like Instablog9ja on Instagram, you must have come across Hushpuppi. He’s one of the individuals that musician, 9ice, mentioned in his controversial hit song Living Things which was widely believed as promoting internet fraud(sters) in Nigeria; although 9ice refuted that on Channels TV’s Rubbin’ Minds with Ebuka.
Hushpuppi is probably the most familiar name among the young Nigerians mentioned on 9ice’s song and has been in the center of controversies including exchange of words with music superstars Davido, Phyno and KCee. This prompted a vast inquiry into his source of income. There was little confirmation and more hearsay until he took to Snapchat to ask some of his friends for money. Responding to those asking what he did for living, he said he begged for a living. Looking at the facts that subsequently emerged, he might have actually meant it.
In his bid to show off his rich friends who send a lot of money to him, Hushpuppi uploaded a screenshot of GTBank credit alert of NGN300,000 with an email address that made us curious. The bank account was registered with a suspicious email address – jwoodscrane@yahoo.com
A “social engineer” (SE) took this email address and ran it through a virtual mail registry. Then, performed a number of mappings to determine the social profile of this anonymous identity. Below is what was found:
When the SE compared the email from the virtual registry with the email from Hushpuppi‘s bank alert, it was a 100% match. But this is not the end. A step further to put a face to the mail address was also done and we see the email address was mapped to a single profile on Facebook, no suggestions or similar profiles at all. It is mapped directly to a single Facebook account: Jane Woodscrane
The account has just a few pictures with the usual Facebook privacy feature turned on, which is said to be very peculiar with Nigerian scammers.
According to the SE, Hushpuppi probably has more aces up his sleeves beyond creating fake accounts and using such to get money from unsuspecting individuals.
“This could be his past or his latest parole… but one thing is so certain, this is a part of who Hushpuppi is,” he said.
“I do social engineering for fun….so if he would like to bark at this, he should remember there is more where that came from unless he is a close friend to the CEO of Google and would put a call through to him to wipe off all his related records off the internet (plus dark web).”
Why you should be worried
Many times, unsuspecting Nigerians will have their accounts hacked or cloned. Then the person behind the act would start reaching out to the friends of the individual; asking them for money and other favours. This is why it is very important for everyone to take action to ensure that they have not been hacked or cloned.
When a hacker hacks an account, he or she would probably change the access password and takeover the account. What often happens in Nigeria is the original account holder would go and create another one and the hacker would have a field day with the first account. It may be Facebook or an email. However, creating a new account isn’t enough, there are ways to report the hacked account to Facebook and Google.
I also recommend that you search for your name on Facebook and Google, just to know what will turn up in case someone else has created another account in your name and is targeting your friends.
Take it a step further and run a Google Image search to ensure that your image isn’t being used by someone else to deceive people. It is easy to do. Just go to image.google.com, drag and drop an image into the search box and matches will come up.