Episode 48 - Fighting Scammers on Your Bank or Credit Union Facebook Page

Hi there. I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO of FI GROW Solutions. We are an end on marketing and sales agency, and we work exclusively with banks and credit unions. And I'm here with Ida Burr. Ida is our digital ads manager, and she works with almost all of our clients. Say, hi, Ida.

Hey everyone.

So Ida and I were just having a really good conversation about some problems that have been popping up for a number of our clients around scammers and fraudulent content going up on, we were talking about Facebook specifically, but social media in general and Facebook specifically. So we were talking about, okay, what are we doing about this? What's the advice that we can be giving our clients to avoid some of these situations? And I was like, let's stop and hit record and share this with everybody because I think this is going to be really useful.

So scammers, Ida, and what's going on on social media, specifically Facebook, why is this coming back around? I feel like we had a breath, it wasn't so bad, and now things are popping back up again. So what are you seeing? Why are we having this conversation? Why is it necessary to figure this out right now?

So I mean, scammers are always evolving and coming up with new things. They're trying to bend the rules and get by. One of the biggest things we've noticed is with reviews on Facebook pages, because you can't hide or delete reviews per Facebook's rules. They want it to be fair. So they don't want somebody to just come in and give you a bad review and you're able to delete it.

Okay.

So one thing we've been telling clients, the biggest thing is to turn the reviews off at this point. It's not really adding any benefit to the page because you'll get a lot of five star reviews, but it's scam, and it's linked to websites or it's giving false information and phone numbers.

Gotcha. So basically, it's like people coming in and putting a five star review and then putting a bunch of stuff in there about something they're selling or they're trying to get people to come to their website and convert or give them their information. And it's all linked and hyperlinked right there on your Facebook page. So basically, we've been telling clients, listen, the benefit of reviews in Facebook is really no longer outweighing the risk. Is that basically a good summary?

Absolutely. And even I had one client that was questioning it, and I went back and looked through their reviews and their last real review was in early 2022, so it was over a year since they had an actual Facebook review. And in between that, there was 20 scam reviews.

Gotcha.

So it's just not really...

I mean, it used to be that people would go to Facebook to see reviews, but now, the Google reviews and the reviews that you get when you search the name of a business are really the main reviews that people are looking at. So using Facebook reviews as a way to promote yourself is not necessary as much anymore. All right. So besides reviews, we're also seeing lots of spammy comments on contests and on just posts in general. So what have you found that is helping clients deal with this in real time? Because this happens, and then you don't want to wait hours until somebody catches it and comes in and does something about it. So what can a marketer at a bank or credit union do to prevent this in real time?

Yeah. So that's exactly what happens. Like you have a post that blows up and has a bunch of views, and then the spam comments keep trickling in from there. And the realtime solution is, now Facebook offers moderation assistant.

Okay.

And that pretty much you can go in, you toggle it on, they have a ton of different criteria that you can assign, and that will automatically hide any comment in real time that comes up that meets that criteria.

All right. So you don't have to turn off all comment abilities, but you can go in and it's basically artificial intelligence really, or something where basically, it's an automatic system through Facebook where it can, if somebody posts a review that is hopefully spam, that it will hide it. So what do you select? How do you configure that to make sure that it's not just hiding all the reviews or all of the comments?

Yeah. So they have a ton of different options you could choose from. You can go off of profile criteria or the comment itself.

Okay.

So profile things would be like, if it's a brand new account, or if the account doesn't have any friends, or if the account doesn't have followers or no profile picture. And you can even set it up if the person has past offenses. So I believe it's three in the past month. If you've put in three comments in the past month, it will automatically hide any new comments coming in from that same person.

Nice. Okay. What about if it's somebody who meets all those criteria, but it's still a spam comment? Or is there any other way to filter the actual content of a comment?

Yeah. So you could also do the comment criteria. So you could say things like, there's a link in the comment, or there's any kind of profanity, any specific keywords. So if you notice you're getting a lot of copy paste of the same exact comment, you can take a piece of that comment and put those keywords right in this assistant.

Okay.

And even if the comment has a video or an image in it, you could block comments like that. So it comes down to what you need, you can personalize it to the scammers that are trying to take over your page.

Yeah. I mean, we've seen... With contests, for example. We had somebody actually try to mimic a contest landing page and capture member account numbers and details like personal information through a fake form. So it's really important to make sure you stay on top of this to keep your members, your customers safe and their account information safe. The other thing that we did with one of those is that, right in the body of the post, we're putting things like, "We will not ask for any account information to enter this contest" or something like that, so that they know, so people know that to enter the contest, they don't have to provide personal information, just contact details.

Yeah. And even just to be very clear about how you're going to announce the winner. So saying something like, "One person will be chosen. You'll hear directly from us. And we will call you, we'll email you, we'll..." Whatever.

Yeah.

That way, they know what to expect if they win.

Yeah. And so the last thing is, what if you want to go in... If it's automatically hiding comments and what people are posting, how do you go in and see like, oh, what if it's accidentally set too strict and it's hidden a bunch of stuff that you're not sure it needs to be hidden. Is there a way to go in and see what was removed from the page?

Yeah. So right in the tool, they also have the activity log.

Okay.

Once you go to that, you can filter by date or you can just look at the most recent and scroll through, but it lists every single comment that has been hidden.

Okay.

And you can undo it there as well if the comment, it isn't spam, and then you can adjust your criteria based on that.

Nice. Okay. Cool. Awesome. Well, this sounds really useful. It sounds like a great way to take a little bit of the pressure off of constantly being online and checking the institution's Facebook pages or their social media. Hopefully some of these social media sites will be providing similar kinds of filtering in the future. So thank you so much for all of this. If you all are interested in learning more about social media and digital ads for financial institutions, please visit us at figrow.com. We have lots of great podcasts and resources, eBooks, and also blogs about marketing and how to get your message out there. And so in the meantime, let's just all get out there and make it happen.