Director of New Media J.D. Ross was quoted in a New York Times article titled “A Facebook ‘Welcome’ That May Not Be” on Dec. 8. The article, which also appeared on the paper’s “The Choice” blog, described the activities of a firm called Roomsurf.
The organization has created Facebook pages that masquerade as official college Facebook pages and offer to match incoming freshmen with roommates for a fee. Ross and colleagues at SUNY Oswego and Belmont University identified the “deceptive marketing tactics” and created a list of more than 140 Roomsurf Facebook pages. Last year, Ross identified the same bogus enterprise, operating under another name, in a Washington Post article.
