Three Years of Facebook Forgery

December 8th, 2010

Update – 12/8/10, 9:45 PM – According to a new post on the New York Times Choice Blog, many of the deceptive RoomSurf initiated groups have added language to identify their affiliation with the company.  In addition, the fake profile of Justin Blackwell appears to have been removed.

We’re now entering our third admission cycle with fraudulent Facebook groups dedicated to shilling for a business at the expense of the student experience.

As many colleges and universities set up their “Class of 2015″ pages and groups for soon-to-be-admitted freshman, over 150 fake groups are already out there, created by Florida-based roommate matching service RoomSurf.com.

This year is a little different, however, and a whole lot more deceptive.  Last year, the service established groups with names such as “URoomSurf Group for XXXX College Class of 2014,” and used RoomSurf’s logo as the group graphic. This year, RoomSurf has lifted the logos and wordmarks of colleges and universities and used them to populate the group graphic – making the group appear as if it were established and/or sanctioned by the school.

Colleges and Universities that create their own “Class of 20xx” groups and pages usually do so to help foster discussions and relationships between admitted students, and give them a direct line to the institution if they have questions or concerns – many of these groups are moderated by, or at least reviewed by, current students and/or admission office staffers. That same level of engagement and involvement won’t happen on the RoomSurf initiated groups.

If you work in higher education and find that RoomSurf has usurped your logo or school picture and has created a group on behalf of your institution, here are a few things you can do to help mitigate the damage:

1) Work to direct your prospective and admitted students directly into YOUR group. E-mails, links from the Admission page to the correct group, and a notice in the acceptance letter with a customized URL are all easy ways to make this happen.

2) Since RoomSurf grabbed your logo or picture without your permission, you can click “Report Group” in the lower left-hand corner of the page and report the group to Facebook as “Spam/Scam.”  You should also report the theft of your image by filing a DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement with Facebook.  Make sure you include the link to the fraudulent group on the DMCA form to ensure Facebook can find the issue.  There is no guarantee that Facebook will take action, but I can speak from experience in that I was able to have Facebook remove a bogus (although non-RoomSurf-related) group for our college last year.

3) If the RoomSurf-created group has a number of misdirected students already joined, you can join the group as well and post a message to the wall explaining the issue and pointing them to the official group.

More information and background on this issue:

Class of 2015 Groups – News Articles:

Class of 2015 Groups – Blogs:

Class of 2015 Groups – Discussions:

Previous “Facebookgate” issues:

Posts | Comments | Trackback


2 Responses to “Three Years of Facebook Forgery”

  1. 1Facebookgate all over again? | higher ed marketing
    December 8th, 2010 @ 9:54 am

    [...] Three years of Facebook Forgery – by J.D. Ross [...]

  2. 2Michael Bungartz
    April 13th, 2011 @ 5:57 pm

    The sad reality is that still for every one college that is aware of “facebook forgery” there are at least 10 others that have no idea it’s happening, nor the students who join them..

    As you stated in your tips, schools will need to be aware and proactive about managing their FB presence…

    Thanks JD

Leave a Reply

  1.  
  2.  
  3.  
You can keep track of new comments to this post with the comments feed.

Archives

HigherEd Bloggers