Facebook Takes Steps to Deal with Gift Card Scams

Like many other Facebook users Jeff Crites heard of the US$1,000 Best Buy gift-card offer last month from a friend, a Web savvy director of social media at a Fortune 500 company.

By Robert McMillan

April 07, 2010 — IDG News Service — Like many other Facebook users Jeff Crites heard of the US$1,000 Best Buy gift-card offer last month from a friend, a Web savvy director of social media at a Fortune 500 company.

He clicked on a link that took him to a Facebook fan page promising a sweet offer: If he clicked through and was one of the first 20,000 people to become Best Buy fans, he'd get a $1,000 gift card to spend on electronics. To Crites, a marketing consultant who makes his living understanding social media, a $20 million promotion to get just 20,000 Facebook fans struck a wrong note. Companies simply don't give away hundreds of dollars to Facebook fans. "It just didn't seem right and it didn't feel right," he said. "They're going to give away a sandwich or a box of cookies."

He sent a message to the friend who'd mentioned the offer, and within minutes they agreed that it was a scam.

Welcome to the latest Facebook con game: fake gift cards.

In the past months, fan pages have popped up all over the social networking site, offering too-good-to-be-true gift cards. There's the $500 Whole Foods card, the $10 Walmart offer, and the $1,000 Ikea gift card. The Ikea page put these gift card scams on the map last month, when it quickly racked up more than 70,000 fans before being snuffed. Facebook has also taken down Target and iTunes gift card scam pages in the past few months.

Many of these pages have fake posts suggesting that the giveaway offer worked, but the sites typically lead to affiliate marketing Web sites that try to collect data and generate Web traffic for advertisers, according to Simon Axten, a Facebook spokesman.

The gift-card scams have been circulating via e-mail for years now, but they're still a novelty on Facebook.

Because anyone can set up a fan page for virtually anything -- and many pages do contain legitimate gift-card offers -- it's a thorny problem for Facebook to solve. Right now, the company is playing the social networking version of whack-a-mole, with a team of engineers monitoring the problem and deleting groups, applications, and fan pages as quickly as it can find them.

The company is trying to get the upper hand on the scammers, however. "We've started building an automated system to detect this type of suspicious content and behavior more quickly before it's even reported," Axten said in an e-mail interview.

Facebook won't say how many people have joined these fake groups, but according to Axten, "this is happening on a relatively minor scale, especially since we're quickly removing the groups and pages in many cases before they go viral."

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