Towards the end of 2016, my facebook feed was filled with fake giveaways. A trend had appeared where Facebook pages disguised themselves as legitimate brands, offering competitions to win popular products, such as Playstations, iPhones and fully-paid vacations.
The catch? There were no winners and while the pages were getting likes and their posts spread all across Facebook, the team behind started sharing links to get products extremely cheap, you just had to enter your credit card details. Of course, they only mention the monthly fee, in a small note no one sees - and suddenly users who think they are entering a competition to win an iPhone suddenly see themselves paying DKK 299,- ($50) a month.
I decided it couldn't be true that we as internet users, had to keep seeing these pages - so as a develop I created a website which uses an algorithm to detect the fake pages. That website is "erdetfake.dk" (is it fake .dk)
After the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal Facebook started requiring registered companies for access to some of the data that ErDetFake was relying on. Since I was living in the US at the time, I didn't feel like registering a Company in Denmark, nor registering one in the US. As a result, the system is no longer operational and the Facebook page I created is mostly used to spread warnings about known bad pages.
Er det fake was featured in Danish newspaper Politiken, "Falske konkurrencer hærger på Facebook og Instagram" on October 26th, 2016
A sad trend has been going on on Facebook, at least for danes, in the past couple of months. A big number of fake pages have been appearing mimicking big brands luring people to like and share their posts with fake competitions. The scheme is made to get likes for the page and eventually sell it
Read on