Hijackers Attempt Sabotage of WTF Magazine

WTF Magazine has been rebuilding their presence on Facebook after their old fan page was deleted.  On Tuesday, Jason Fyk and his admin team have had to ban several fans.

It turns out they aren’t who they say they are.

“They tried adding 400 fake accounts to my personal page and are currently adding a flood of fake accounts to WTF Magazine.” Fyk said.

This isn’t the first time he’s dealt with this group.  Business Insider has details on a group dedicated to hijacking fan pages for fun and profit.

Hijackers send a flood of fake likes to a fan page so they can report content that is posted.  “Jack Evans along with Austin Harrig, Anthony Machia (Ortiz), Ken Ballou, George Portillo, Dexter Hyman and others have attacked us without cause for years.” Fyk said.

Pages that reach 100,000 likes are a prime target for the group lead by Evans.

In some cases, duplicate accounts are created.  They can be used to evade banning while continually harassing the intended target.

The group is known as “The Community,” and their profile claims to be against cyber bullying.  The group’s description is only a ruse.

The hijacking of pages began as a way of pulling pranks and was only for fun before things got serious.

Now it can be done for fun and profit.

Below are a couple of screenshots showing the impact of fake likes.

“I managed to get 99% off my personal page but that was a small page and 400 likes in 2 hours is noticeable.” Fyk said.

The lack of legal precedent has left little recourse, though Anthony Ortiz appears to admit some wrong doing in his interview with Alyson Shontell, especially when it comes to defamation.

The only current recourse is to continually ban fake accounts.  We’ll keep everyone here updated as new information becomes available.