Fake Facebook college class groups uncovered

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

We may be about to see the latest frontier of viral marketing--fake students starting groups for the incoming class of 2013 in the name of data collection.

Brad Ward, a recruitment specialist at Butler University, outlined the details on his blog. He became suspicious after talking to a colleague at Winthrop University. Here are the common links:

Class of 2013 groups are being started at a bunch of universities.
The people that start the groups aren't registered at those schools.
Those same names--Patrick Kelly, Justin Gaither, James Gaither among others--pop up repeatedly.

The game: Get admin rights to groups that collectively add up to about 1,000,000 freshmen. Ward concludes:

Think of it: Sitting back for 8-10 months, (even a few years), maybe friending everyone and posing as an incoming student. Think of the data collection. The opportunities down the road to push affiliate links. The opportunity to appear to be an 'Admin' of Your School Class of 2013. The chance to message alumni down the road. The list of possibilities goes on and on and on.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is now on the case and has further details about a company called College Prowler that appears to have a common bond with these groups.Most of the Chronicle's information revolves around a message aimed at Ward. The Chronicle reports:

Later today, Luke Skurman, College Prowler's chief executive, confirmed in a message on Mr. Ward's blog that his company had been "directly or indirectly involved" in creating the 2013 groups. "The original purpose was to use these groups as a way to inform students that they can access a free guide about their new college on our site," he wrote. "No employee or anyone else associated with College Prowler has used these groups to send out messages or wall posts." He provided a list of names "associated with" College Prowler and said they would be removed from the 2013 groups immediately.

Yet Mr. Skurman also wrote that he learned "about an hour ago" that College Prowler had been working with an unnamed company "that may have been using fake aliases to create these groups." Mr. Skurman did not respond to The Chronicle's requests for an interview, so The Chronicle could not confirm that he had written the message on Mr. Ward's blog.

The solution here seems pretty obvious. Universities need to start their official groups on Facebook before some spam happy affiliate marketing type does. There may also be a verification hook for Facebook too. Should it verify who you really are?

[sharmajunior]

Well what a surprise....NOT!

Facebook used to be so much better in its earlier days when it required you to be registered in the school before you could do anything on it. It all fell apart when they opened up to the whole world. So sad....

[sharmajunior]

By registered in the school i meant that you had to have an email address that ended in (nameofschool.edu)

[adasha76]

thats fine in principle for the present day, but what about schools and colleges from years past? I don't have an email address for the school I left 15 years ago

[sharmajunior]

Well they did have a procedure to get people in who graduated from college a while ago with no email address. I don't quite remember exactly but they did have it.

[vamman]

Now all of these people I never really cared about want to be my "friend". The day I found these high school losers on FaceBook was the day I stopped using it.

[lordmorgul]

Try actively managing your friends list and communicating with people rather than relying on the fact that facebook required .edu addresses... to say you stopped using it because people you cannot face up to and say 'I do not want to talk to you' is pretty pathetic.

[lordmorgul]

This doesn't really surprise me that some people would start these groups, and quite frankly... if the majority of the people in the group turn out to be members of that class, this isn't really a 'fake' group... its just one administrated by an outsider. Ultimately, these groups don't mean much, because people join them, and ignore them. Very little discussion happens on such groups walls, its mostly 'hello' crap from people who join and then ignore it forever.

The smaller groups that form after people take classes together, or find groups of people in the same major during a school year are really alot more useful to the people at the school.

[eagledrc]

Verification is a pretty good idea. Facebook does a lot of it now.

[Goodbye Helicopter]

just goes to show, the so-called cloud and web 2.0 is not necessarily a good thing.
That said, Facebook can be a great way to get in touch and stay in touch with real friends.
Minus all the dumb so-called apps.
And you should have the nads to say to somebody, "no, I was never your friend and you were never mine, so get lost."

[humanssssss]

People who have nothing better to do with their life to go on Facebook to read message from their friends and waiting for people to send them messages and add as friends. They are pathetic. The government now has to create new laws to protect these people from getting spam friends request. There are already idiots who helped created the CAN-SPAM act, now they want to create a law prohibiting friend and invitation request if the requesting party are doing it to collection information.

Humans ... I don't know when they will learn that free speech means you don't have the right to control what others say. Free speech does not say anything about listening to the speech.

[sanenazok]

Whooptido...Facebook stopped being a walled garden for academia years ago and the academics are just realizing this it looks like! What did they expect, once you open a service to the wide world the first people that move in are commercial interests and spammers. These academics really take the cake with their surprise that some corporation would use facebook to attract pie-eyed freshmen and try and get some marketing information from them. Next they'll have a forum to complain about this rather than setting up their own competing groups.