USocial, a company which sells Facebook friends and fans, has received a cease and desist from Facebook for violating the company’s terms of service. The BBC claims that the issue at hand is that the company is “letting people profit from their profile”, which is strictly forbidden within Facebook’s terms. We’ve reached out to Facebook for clarification on the issue, to see if there were any issues with the company selling fans. In early October we highlighted the growth in the pay per fan business model, and since then we’ve heard an increasing amount of buzz about the space.

More specific to the Cease and Desist sent to USocial were claims that the marketing firm “violates its rights by sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm.” In other words, USocial’s activity is not kosher. The real question though is whether or not Facebook allows the selling of fans and/or friends as long as user accounts aren’t being harvested or accessed through unauthorized means.

While Facebook has explicitly stated that users cannot profit from their own profiles, it hasn’t been stated if third parties can sell friends or fans without providing monetary incentives to users. There is a rapidly increasing number of companies who sell fans to brands for Facebook Pages and it’s a topic which Facebook has yet to publicly comment on. Instead, “pay per fan” businesses continue to operate under the radar without explicit approval from Facebook.

Based on the BBC article, we’d assume that USocial simply crossed the line and paid users for adding friends and/or accessed user accounts through unauthorized means to generate new connections. We’ve reached out to Facebook for a comment on the issue and will be sure to update this post if we hear back.

Update
While Facebook didn’t clarify what exactly took place with USocial, they did provide the following statement: “We’ll continue to protect our users and the integrity of our site by enforcing our policies. We’re pleased that uSocial has agreed to comply.”