In the last few weeks I seem to have been inundated with events coming up in my Facebook feed which are classed as online events but are actually events that are taking place in real life. I therefore wondered if there was some kind of scam running to get people to sign up for fake Facebook events.

One particular example is an event for the Clacton Air Show (which is not far from me) which appeared in my feed because one of my friends had clicked ‘interested’.

On a quick search of events for the Clacton Airshow I found quite a number of them! Obviously there was the official event page (which you can find here) and you can tell it is official because of who is listed as the organisers.

There was also a lot of online events which immediately rang alarm bells with me.

Clicking on one of the events showed that it was organised by a page called ‘Air Shows Are Back’. This may be a perfectly legitimate page that just wants to list airshows but there is no reason why they would need to create a fake event that people might want to click on to say that they are going to.

Why not just set up a website with a list of airshows?

My thought was that they are trying to scrape personal information from the people who say they are interested or are going to the event.

I don’t know if people are able to do that but as there are a lot of people setting up fake competitions on Facebook I guess there must be some kind of way of doing this. I have seen a YouTube video of some software that allows you to download all of the names of people that are going to or are interested in an event through the Facebook API so maybe it is only a short step further to get their email address or other data.

I think in all things Facebook, the lesson is to look carefully before clicking on ‘like’, ‘going’ etc as there are obvious things that you can look at to see if something is a scam or not. The first thing is to check out the organiser or the about page of the group. often that is lacking in information like address etc.

Clicking going to an online event when you know it is happening in person should also be a red card so just think twice before signing up for fake Facebook events.

Linked Article – How Can You Tell a Facebook Competition is Fake?