First: Hi everybody, this is my first contact to fraternities/sororities in the USA, I want to get more information of you. I'm in a fraternity in Cologne/Germany. For my reply it's important to know that we wear - hm - in an online dictionary I found the word "sash" for the German word "Schaerpe", I don't know if this is correct. It's a small stripe with a combination of three different coulours for all the different fraternities in Germany that we wear round the right shoulder over chest and back to our hip. I hope you can imagine how that looks like, if not: have a look at
www.cartellverband.de, by clicking on a picture there you'll see... I call this thing "sash" in my messages until someone tells me the correct vocabulary...
Now, here's my reply: We've just had the opposite case: some random guys with "sashes" on visited our house. They had really no idea about fraternities! We suppose they heard that - and this is traditional - whenever you visit another house they let you in and give you beer for free. They wanted to use us to get drunk in a very cheap way, we don't know where they got the sashes...