Fake Facebook group using our name and logo
Please beware, a group is copying our brand and community and sharing potentially dangerous links, i.e. promotional content.
This is the group: allfreestuffanything
This is a violation of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and protected by law 4481/2017, Art. 52 and the Copyright Act of the U.S. Code (Title 17). Depending on the case, this might be criminal offence.
What we know so far:
The group -surprisingly- has no moderators, but does have 12 administrators. 2 of which are actual personal Facebook profiles (outlined green) and 10 of which are Facebook pages. Even more concerning is that these pages were all created recently, around the same date, have 0 likes or followers and some of them are made to look like personal profiles.
Furthermore, they post fraudulent content, including fake information and photo’s to make it appear as though they are giving away free products and yard sales (seen on the left screenshot in the image below).
What they’re actually doing is promoting a vague-looking link that forwards you to an entirely different url/website called moms connect (as seen in the center screenshot).
This website is encouraging you to download some kind of app that, all of a sudden, has to do with groceries. Clicking on either Android or iOS results in a browser warning.
Extra notes:
- The group was created 8 weeks ago, on July 24th of this year.
- Their group url/tag/@ is “/allfreestuffanything”. Ours is: “/FreeStuffAnything”.
- They currently have about 20.000 members.
What can you do?
- Report the group for spam. You can do this on a pc or laptop, by going to their group, clicking the 3 dots somewhere to the upper right, select ‘report group’, select ‘spam’, then submit.
- Do not interact with the fake group, in any way.
- Let other people know, or even share this post.
- Pay attention when participating or interacting with pages, groups and content in general, on Facebook, as well as other platforms and websites.
How to tell the difference?
For this group (and possible fake copies in the future), you can do the following:
- If you click on the ‘members’ tab, it will show you a list of admins and moderators. Our page with the same name (Free Stuff Anything) is admin of our group and will never be an admin of another group that isn’t ours.
- If you can’t click on the members tab (because it’s a private group and you’re not a member) that’s another indication the group is fake. Our group is public.
- Also, if you look closely at their banner image, you can see it’s blurry. A result of downloading and re-uploading an image, decreasing its quality in the process.
- We also added a trademark ™ icon to our group name, to hopefully further help with identification.
We’ll keep you updated on this matter.
Thanks. 🧡
Update
September 28, 2023
We got Facebook to officially remove their banner image (which was actually stolen from us). Unfortunately, they’re still using our name.
Their group now looks like this:
