Fan Page Scams

Sometimes fan pages for games can be great places to find new friends to play with, rally the troops for tough group events, or get tips on how to master a game. (One that we can personally recommend is Castle Age Army Growth Only and its linked Dragons, Bosses, and World Monsters pages. Actively moderated, and does what it says on the tin!) But some of them are just chock-full of spam, scams, and quite possibly viruses. Here are a few things to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to become a fan of a particular page:

1. Visit the page before accepting a recommendation. Just becoming a fan won’t do you any permanent harm, but when you discover your feed has been overrun by spam, you may regret that quick click. It’s also not a bad idea to see who is recommending this stuff to you – they may need a heads-up that they’re not being very helpful, or, if they’re a stranger, blocking them is always an option.

2. Look at the level of activity. If their wall has new “add me!” posts by fans every thirty seconds, that’s great – that won’t show up as spam in your feed, and it means the page is actively used. However, if the page owners are posting every ten minutes, that WILL show up in your feed, and is decidedly sketchy besides – even we don’t have useful things to say that often!

3. Look at the kind of official posts. If the owners of the page are posting genuine tips, reposting official news, or making posts so people can meet in the comments, that’s great. If you see “Click here to get free points!” links, “One weird old tip” weight-loss ads, or even just the same link reposted over and over, give it a miss.

4. Look carefully at the links themselves. Link shorteners like tinyurl and bit.ly are terribly handy – we use them ourselves to track clicks and make links Twitter-friendly. But they can also be used for less savory purposes, like concealing your destination so that you think you’re going to a safe site when in fact you’re heading for virus-land. If you’re uncertain, or if the site they tell you they’re sending you to doesn’t match the actual link, don’t click! This is particularly important when a fan site purports to send you to a game’s official site – a quick Google should find the actual official site, and you can double-check that way. (And if you’re trying to visit us, you can always see the latest by going straight to neighborlygames.com.)

5. Ask yourself, “Who’s getting more out of this page, me or the owners?” There’s no shame in trying to make money. We’re big fans of it ourselves. But Facebook fan pages are not designed to make the page owners rich, and any game-related fan page with that in mind is almost certain to be forced to make some unsavory choices. Advertising spam, links to scam sites, identity theft attempts – all of these are possibilities, and all of them are worth avoiding. If a fan page looks like it’s trying to make money off of you, skip it – you’d be better off spending the money in-game instead.

This article was brought to you by a particularly heinous Farmville “fan page” that’s done just about every one of the icky things mentioned above. Farmville in particular, because of its popularity, seems to be the main target of scammers and spammers, but any reasonably popular game attracts people looking for a quick buck. Keep these tips in mind, and keep your anti-spyware and anti-virus software up to date!