Given the world today, I guess it was just a matter of time that The Folk School community would be the target of attempted fraud. I’m sorry to say that it has happened.
Someone interested in registering for a class this month saw a comment on our Facebook event, from a stranger who is not affiliated with The Folk School, for the Headbands class, saying to message him to register*. When she did that, he asked for payment through Facebook, using Apple Pay, Zelle, or Venmo (none of which we are set up to accept). Thankfully, she was leery about paying that way, and contacted us. It turns out that the class she was interested in was full, so not available for registration anyway. A minor detail like that didn’t stop the crook from trying to charge for the class, of course.
The moral of the story is that if anything seems fishy, it probably isn’t us you’re dealing with. We do a lot of silly things at The Folk School, but we don’t do fishy. Well, maybe the Kippered Salmon class….
Use this as a guide:
- The only place online that we take class or event registrations is on our website at https://folk.school. Nowhere else online, period. We can also handle registrations by phone in special circumstances or in person.
- We cannot accept payment through Facebook, other than donations directly on our page at https://www.facebook.com/TheFolkSchool/. Sometimes generous members of our community do Facebook fundraisers on our behalf, and the donation button appears on their personal pages. Please only contribute through this channel if you know the person IRL–in real life–and are sure the page is legit. Otherwise please don’t donate through that channel, because there is no way to know if your donation will make it to us.
- On the website, https://folk.school, our payment processor is PayPal, none other. (And you don’t need a PayPal account to register for a class or make a donation.) We also use Square for in-person purchases and QuickBooks payments for invoicing. That’s it.
- The only email addresses we’ll use to communicate with you end in @folk.school. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to spoof a legitimate email address, but if someone communicates with you about a registration with a non-@folk.school email address, it is almost certainly fraudulent.
- Don’t respond to a comment on an event or post! We’ll never ever suggest you register that way, and if we respond to anything, such as to answer a question about the class, it will be through The Folk School page/identity, not our personal accounts.
If you detect fraud or attempts at it, please report it both to us and Facebook! Here are some good links to have:
- Report a Facebook profile or Page pretending to be you or someone else. In this day and age, I’m not optimistic that Facebook will do much, but this is still a necessary step.
- Avoiding scams on Facebook provides some basic information for staying safe.
If anything ever seems fishy about something with The Folk School online, feel free to ask us if it’s legit. You can contact us and we’ll be happy to help you sort it out.
* The attacker was named “Charles fritz” using the email address dtngman@gmail.com in this case, but I suspect tomorrow it will be another name and address.