Natasha Cann endured the Father's Day from hell on Sunday when hackers broke into her Facebook account and proceeded to scam her closest friends out of significant amounts of money.

The 34-year-old professional who works for BHP Billiton in South Australia - and used to work in IT for the military - thought her account was locked down but the painful reality hit her on Sunday night when a friend phoned her from Singapore.

Natasha Cann ... victim of a Facebook scam.

The friend had just received a Facebook message, purportedly from Cann, saying she had been seriously assaulted and robbed at gunpoint in London and urgently needed money to get home.

The message, which was sent to all of Cann's 400 friends, asked for an initial amount of $10,000, which had to be wired in cash as soon as possible to a Western Union account.