Hey everyone,
So I was just on facebook today talking to the Original McMaster 2013 admin(Who I know for a fact is real and also on Insiders) and he linked me to this Toronto Star Article:
Facebook fakers prey on students
Jul 06, 2009 04:35 AM
Paola Loriggio
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Prospective university students are falling prey to a growing Facebook fraud as marketers set up fake academic groups to vacuum up their personal information.
After a sweep that shut down a number of fraudulent groups last month, a new batch has sprung up, targeting the classes of 2014 and 2015, and experts say more are on the way.
The stakes are high – potentially years' worth of data and thousands of contacts in a desirable demographic. So high, in fact, one company allegedly tried to bribe and blackmail a student to help a scam.
Hundreds of students in the GTA were told in June to abandon fake "Class of 2013" Facebook groups, many sporting official school logos. A sweep shut down groups targeting classes at more than a dozen major Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto, York, Ryerson and McMaster.
There is "a whole subculture" of people trying to make a quick buck by impersonating legitimate organizations and celebrities online, says Avner Levin, director of the Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute at Ryerson University.
The set-up goes beyond sending ads to those who join the fraudulent groups, Levin says. Unbeknownst to students, marketers are building mailing lists, collecting personal information that they can store and sell for years, he says.
A spokesperson for Facebook said the company doesn't have statistics on people creating false accounts, dubbed "squatters." But she said the company removes the accounts when notified through the "report" link found on each page.
The discovery of marketer-run university groups rocked U.S. academic circles in December, after dozens of fake groups were linked to campus guidebook company College Prowler. The company apologized for misleading students.
Alerted to the U.S. scam, officials at Dalhousie University reported a fake "Class of 2013" group to Facebook administrators during the winter and had it deleted.
When that group disappeared, Tyler Thorne, an incoming Dalhousie freshman, started a new one. It wasn't long before marketers contacted him, asking to become the group's administrators.
The marketers (a "major event promotion company") tried to bribe him with money and concert tickets, said Thorne, a 17-year-old from Halifax. When that failed, he said, they threatened to blacklist him from all local bars.
Matthew Melnyk, an electronic outreach recruitment officer at Brock University, discovered a fake Brock group in February. He later linked it to a network of more than a dozen suspicious groups targeting incoming students at major Ontario universities.
The groups were shut down in early June, but a new generation has already appeared, targeting the next two waves of freshmen.
At least three of the new groups – for Brock, Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier – are run by Cory Rosenfield and his event promotion company, Eruption Productions, which specializes in frosh week parties.
Rosenfield, a 23-year-old Laurier graduate, admits he uses the groups to promote his business, but says that unlike other Facebook marketers, he doesn't spam students or collect their personal data.
"If I could, I would," he said.
Rosenfield says his pages don't claim any affiliation with the universities in question.
Lysan Sequeira, 18, left a fake U of T group after receiving a warning message from a real university group. "It definitely changed how I behave on Facebook," she said. She tightened her profile's privacy settings, and no longer accepts friendship requests from strangers.
Ryan McNutt of Dalhousie University, who discovered the fake group linked to the school, says most universities are just starting to monitor sites like Facebook.
Levin, of the Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute, says Facebook should do more to seek out and delete squatters' accounts. He also has a warning for students who think they're safe from fraudsters because they use strict privacy controls on their Facebook accounts: Marketers can deduce demographic data from users' networks, and guess email addresses from their names and academic institutions.
Though Facebook's terms of use ban false accounts and misleading information, the groups often go unnoticed, he says.
HOW TO AVOID FACEBOOK TRAPS
Tips to identify questionable social networking groups:
1. Check the administrators: Often, marketers will use the same account to create several groups covering a large geographic area. Many don't belong to any networks and don't have any friends.
2. Consider the content: If the text appears to have been cut and pasted, it probably was. Watch for ads posted to the group and links to companies and products.
3. Go offline: Don't be afraid to investigate the old-fashioned way – by phone. So-called "official" groups are a dime a dozen; your best bet is to call whomever the group supposedly represents, and check that it's legitimate.
Sources: Avner Levin, director of Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute; Ryan McNutt, social media officer at Dalhousie University
It turns out the second group for McMaster:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=1312752 60602
EDITED the link! sorry
Is FAKE. It has over 962 members who have uploaded their pictures and personal information that is captured by these scammers! Further digging around revealed that the admin has been also uploading advertisements for a tshirt line, the same advertisment is also uploaded onto 5-6 other groups for class of 2013 created by the same company for other Universities. What is even sketchier is that alot of those groups have officer positions like "Student Retention officer", "Student Recruitment officer" and "Member retention officer" none of whom appear to be students. Similarly the admin has privacy settings maxed up and we cannot check who or what he is!
I would suggest everyone to leave that group and delete their pictures and private information and instead join the officially supported(by MSU volunteers and exec) here:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=3554932 3873
it takes us to a group where you're admin 
