Beware of fake car auctions on Facebook

The email was a painful one, but there was nothing I could do about it. The sender said he had wanted to buy an imported ‘tokunbo’ car and while checking online to see what the online car portals had to offer, he stumbled on a Facebook post by a ‘uniformed Custom official’ saying there was a massive clearance sales of seized cars by the Nigerian Customs Service.

After paying the processing fee and 20 per cent of the amount, the phone number of the ‘custom officer’ was no more available. He had vanished into thin air. The individual probably used the picture of a custom official he got from a calendar or on the Internet and had pretended to be someone else.

This is an age-long scam but most people never notice this trap until they try to buy a car. As far back as 2012, the Cable News Network had reported that 83 million of the 955 million monthly active users on Facebook worldwide use duplicate or false accounts.

Truth be told, there are hundreds of fake Facebook pages selling cars online and most of them are fake and the Nigerian Customs Service needs to be aware and proactive about it.

There are also thousands of fake Facebook pages of celebrities asking their fans to fund their charity organisations, fake Facebook pages of churches and pastors asking their fans and followers to pay money or sow into their ministry to be able to access instant miracles and blessings.

These accounts are actively fleecing gullible and unsuspecting individuals and business brands on a daily basis.

When Facebook realised that these fake accounts and scams were eating at the heart of its credibility and reputation it began to purge its platform of fake ‘likes’ and accounts. In fact many brands have come to realise the reason why they are not getting any engagement on their social media platforms is that many of the ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ are fake.

In fact, I recently met a consultant who admitted that a client told him to get him followers and just for the numbers. It was however, an embarrassing sight ,when a newspaper reported the drastic drop in the number of the brand’s followers following one of Facebook’s cleanup process.

Fake Facebook ‘likes’ renders the social media return on engagement and investment useless. While people may celebrate increased numbers, an advert going to your 100,000 like may actually be reaching 40,000 real individuals and 60,000 bots.

The quality and value in Facebook and Twitter is not the number of fan and followers, it is the engagement rate, people willing to read, respond and share your marketing message. Some businesses are running click farms which sell likes and follows to some marketers for a small sum of money. This helps them manufacture the necessary results for people interested in magic number.

Anatomy of a fake Facebook account

While some are actually easy to spot, many others are difficult to identify. Most times, personal profiles of fake accounts have only one profile photo. They probably have never updated their profile or their page recently.

Most times, they steal other people’s pictures to use and this can easily be found out by doing an image search on Google. Fake profiles of girls will have a contact number which I think most ladies will naturally try to avoid. In fact, the most common indicator is that they are reaching out to you after saying that they ‘looked at your profile and they want a relationship with you’ and ‘distance does not matter’.

They haven’t updated their status in a long time because they have to keep up with so many accounts. If you look at their recent activities, they are likely to only be adding friends (or proposed customers in this case). At times, you have a friend request from someone who you thought was already your Facebook friend.

That is probably a duplicate page and you need to confirm from the person independently to know which is the original.

Fake Facebook pages are much more difficult to identify. Most times the official social media profile pages can be found on the official websites. The fake ones, however, try to mimic the original portal and they are always giving personal addresses, websites, phone numbers and emails in a bid to direct you away from the official channels. Never send money to any one you haven’t seen and or pay for good you have not received.

Once they begin to ask for full payment and commitment when they are offering nothing, it’s time to walk away. Always do your independent checks apart from what they tell you.

Identify and report

While Facebook and Twitter themselves do not have tools to identify and delete ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ in bulk, several web applications such as Fakeoff application for Facebook and others like StatusPeople, SocialBakers, SpamFighter and Untweep will help identify if you have fake followers and fans.

While most people easily spot these platforms, we should also help these online communities by reporting them or call them out on social media in order to protect others.

The fact that most of them continue in this means that some unsuspecting individual will land into their carefully set traps. Based on the frequency of spam reports, Facebook will look at the number of people reporting the page and will yank off such pages.

How does this help brands?

I have heard a lot of complaints about decreased engagements and this may be one of the pointers. By eliminating fake fans and followers, brands and businesses will be able to track the effectiveness of their advertising initiatives and to gain better insight into how many people are being engaged. This eventually influences outcomes as views, engagement rate and are a true reflection of their marketing efforts.