Facebook's "Class of 2013" Sites - entrepreneur or scam artist?

2013 Tees is run by college students uniting incoming college freshman classes with class tee shirts. We create unique, relevant tees for college freshman every year. Our tees are worn at around college campuses nation wide at freshman orientation, collegiate sporting events, and everyday college life. We hope you like our tees! Have a great freshman year Class of 2013!

I picked up a rice bowl at the Panda Express in the student union today. On my way out I pass Alan Beaudrie who tells me a story. Alan is in the College of Public Health and works with student services slash academic affairs. He was an early adopter of blogging to reach students and had successful sites for MEZCOPH and the College of Nursing.

Alan tells me that he found a Facebook site directed to the UA's class of 2013. There's also one for the U. of Georgia. And the purpose is simply to suck in in-coming freshmen and get them to buy a t-shirt. Here's a page showing happy students prouding wearing their UGA Go Dawgs! tees. They run about $15 and you pay through PayPal. The tees do not have the university logo on them so I don't think there is any logo infringement. It seems more like we're dealing with entrepreneurs, perhaps college-age, who know how to exploit social software to their advantage. Whether they actually ship a t-shirt we don't know, at least at this time. Could Pay Pal transfer the funds to an account that can be cleaned out without the owners leaving a trace? Maybe because I once fell for the magazine subscription scam my radar is constantly up.

If you have a Facebook account, login and search on class of 2001 + arizona. The first site shows 1,904 members and looks like it could be a legit UA site. But it's not. In recent news it features the point of the site, "Hey don't forget to check out the zona class of 2013 t-shirt here... high quality, tagless, with free shipping. http://www.2013Tees.com/azona" (spelling doesn't count)

Alan also pointed me to a Chronicle of Higher Education article from December 2008, "Company Created Official-Looking 'Class of 2013' Facebook Groups for Hundreds of Colleges." LOTS of comments and well worth reading.