College Marketer Exposed in Facebook Scam

Sam Gustin writes: Facebook has become so big -- and so popular among the highly coveted youth demographic -- that it was only a matter of time before someone tried to take advantage of the service to gain access to the millions of young people who populate the site.


It appears that's just what has happened, after the publisher of a series of college guidebooks was exposed trying to build a massive mailing list of incoming freshmen around the country by creating phony
Facebook groups. College students flock to the class groups as a way of communicating with others.


The kerfuffle started when Brad Ward, electronic communications coordinator at Butler University's admissions department, noticed a weird trend. Over 300 "Class of 2013" Facebook groups were popping up for various colleges, but many of the admins for the groups shared the same name, and weren't affiliated with the schools.


Ward enlisted some help from his commenters and put together a collaborative Google Doc spreadsheet to track the simliarites at the various college groups.


After some sleuthing, Ward discovered that a company which produces college guidebooks with the unfortunate name "College Prowler" has hired interns to create the groups, in an effort to gain access to the
estimated 1 million incoming class of 2013 students across the country. Ward wrote: