Social media can be used as a hunting ground for scammers, and it’s now more important than ever before to protect yourself from such scams. Bands and musicians can take that one step further, and also do what they can to protect their fans from scams.
Here are some helpful suggestions on how you can protect your fans from scams. Many thanks to everyone who contributed towards this article.
- Only allow authorised comments on your Facebook events. This will stop the ‘free streaming’ mob.
- Make sure you tell your fans to only purchase tickets from your approved ticket seller, on both your social media posts, event pages and official press releases.
- Include a direct link to the ticket sale page, not just to the ticket sale website.
- Use ‘Business Suite’ to ‘Ban User’ for any profiles that are selling tickets.
- You will get hammered the closer you get to your shows. You’ll pick up the patterns pretty quickly, and ‘Ban User’ is the quickest and most effective way to remove those people from your good work.
- Click on every profile who comments on your posts, you will see a pattern very quickly. Either they have a) only a couple of photos, b) photos are clearly not from NZ, c) no hometown or about info, d) has only recently joined Facebook and/or e) no NZ likes etc.
- Avoid accepting friend requests from people you don’t know, or new accounts with very little info on them.
- If someone comments on your event pages in an attempt to sell tickets, remove their comments. Alternatively, commenting can be turned off for everyone.
- Ban any scammers or anyone who spams your social media pages as soon as possible. You can also report any such people to the social media platform, to prevent them from doing the same thing to someone else.
- Only open emails and accept downloads from trusted people.
- Keep your email and phone number private – you can give this information to people who ask, but don’t have it publicly available.
- If you have a Facebook group for your street team, make it private. You can still opt to make the group ‘visible’, but keeping it private will mean you will need to approve any new members. If the group is public, anyone can join and post without needing approval.
- Protect your intellectual property and add copyright information on any music and videos which you upload to social media. Don’t forget to also give credit to everyone involved in the creation of your music and videos.
- Regularly check and adjust your privacy and security settings accordingly.
- Regularly search through social media and website profiles for any fake pages which may have been created under your name. If you come across anything which is clearly fake, make a post and let your fans know not to accept friend requests from the fake profile. Anything fake should also be reported to the social media platform.
- You should also regularly check through comments on your posts and delete anything which is obviously a scam, or spam.
