Phony Facebook Haiti Fundraisers

Facebook has been hard at work dispelling rumors that a $1 donation will be made to Haiti for every Facebook Status.

According to the Facebook Fan page:

…Contrary to a current meme, Facebook is not donating $1 for statuses, however we are sharing reputable resources via the “Other Pages” tab on the Global Disaster Relief on Facebook Page.

This comes just days after fan pages, asking users to join by promising a $1 donation for each member, were disabled after attracting 1.5 million members.

Fake fan pages fund-raisers had spread, seemingly, to all parts of the globe. Examples could be found claiming to be based in the United Kingdom, and in multiple languages. One Spanish group currently has 215,000 fans, for example.

MSNBC’s Redtape also spoke with the administrator of a group named “EVERY PERSON THAT JOINS WE WILL DONATE £1 TO HELP PEOPLE IN HAITI!”. A woman who identified herself as a college student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The group had about 5,000 fans on Monday morning. When asked why she started the group, the woman said she hadn’t, and initially denied being an admin. She said she signed up for the fan page “hoping that I can contribute or do something to help the people of Haiti.” Shown the admin page for the group, she offered a different explanation.

“Just check(ed) and you’re right. I don’t even (know) how I became and admin. Honestly, I did not create this or monitor this,” she wrote.

Computer security experts have long warned about what’s now called “promiscuous friending” – the habit of many Facebook users to simply accept all friend requests. That opens the door for computer criminals to take advantage of trust relationships formed on the site. Hackers with friend access can post links to viruses on victims’ walls, for example, or directly message the friends with Trojan horse e-mails.  Fan page administrators have slightly fewer capabilities, but it’s still a bad idea to accept any unexpected fan, group, or friend requests.