Cease & Adapt: Dealer of Facebook friends responds to legal threats
Remember Leon Hill, the controversial peddler of Facebook souls?
Not surprisingly, Hill said he has received a letter from Facebook’s lawyers informing him that his service selling Facebook friends ran afoul of the site’s terms of service and possibly a slew of trademark and computer fraud laws.
After some back and forth with the lawyers, Hill said that he has stopped offering one of his two Facebook marketing services and will no longer solicit friends for customers that have standard Facebook accounts. And he’s removed Facebook’s logos from his site.
“If they did want to take me to court over anything I’d probably be screwed, to be honest,” Hill said, citing Facebook’s deep pockets (He may also have been thinking about the $711 million in damages Facebook recently won in an anti-spam case).
But Hill hasn’t been scared away from Facebook entirely. He said that his firm uSocial will continue to sell fans to customers and companies that maintain a so-called Facebook Fan page.
That’s because the job of rounding up fans for a customer’s Facebook Fan page doesn’t actually require logging into their account, as was necessary for customers with personal Facebook pages. Instead it seems, uSocial will rely on a network of partners to solicit fans for customers by offering them the URL for a Facebook Fan page.
Whether Facebook considers the case closed is not entirely clear. Hill says he has not heard back from Facebook since he informed the company of his position a couple of weeks ago.
Facebook account: free. Friends? About 18 cents apiece
How much are 1,000 Facebook friends worth?
According to Leon Hill, $177.30.
That’s the price that Hill’s online marketing firm uSocial.net is selling Facebook friends for, through a new service that has already raised alarms within Facebook.
Hill’s reputation as a notorious peddler of online souls precedes him, having launched a similar service selling Twitter followers to clients earlier this year.
Another endeavor, in which he sought to “game” social bookmarking site Digg by letting advertisers buy votes to push certain stories to the top of the site, earned him a cease-and-desist letter from Digg’s attorneys, he says. (A Digg representative said the company could not comment).
Now, uSocial has set it sights on Facebook, which Hill believes will be the greatest opportunity yet.
“It’s going to be massive. There are about 20 times more people on Facebook” than on Twitter, said Hill in a telephone interview from his home-base in Brisbane, Australia on Wednesday.
Not a bad concept, if done ethically, but challenging for many businesses to make use of it.
We are a British company that used usocial.net to buy 1000 ‘fans’ for a newly created Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/skiingholidays1 ) for around ~£100, more out of curiosity than anything. Despite telling usocial.net that we are UK based, the fans that we gained from them were all American, so while we gained numbers, we diminished our relevance and simply wish we hadn’t bothered. Just a word of warning!