Woman is accused of selling fake Facebook stock

A WOMAN in the US has been charge with theft after she was accused of selling fake stock in the social network Facebook.

A report on CNBC says that the woman, who is from Wisconsin, pretended to have been gifted a significant chunk of stock in the people database, which she then used to pay other people.

Prosecutors have alleged that Marianne Oleson claimed to have $1m in stock because her daughter knows Mark Zuckerberg. Over a four month period she apparently managed to get others to buy the bogus stock, as well as using some of it to pay off a tradesman's bill.

Yesterday, on the same day that the news broke about the Facebook IPO, she was charged with 31 counts of theft, forgery and making misleading statements.

The scheme, which was successful up to a point, started to fall around Oleson's ears when people became suspicious of things like her using different names and providing strange documentation. However, by that time she is said to have a partially sighted pensioner among her victims.

According to the CNBC report, she allegedly made off with about $50,000 in the scam. µ