I attend UC Riverside and I guess things are a tad different around here. Pref night is before the give you bids, they say it's to show how serious you are about joining them.
To show I'm not lying:
http://www.pikeucr.com/home (look at their rush events)
And another thing is, the underground fraternities table in broad daylight with all the other fraternities but they don't have a national HQ or anything. I guess someone created the letters themselves.
To show I'm not lying:
http://www.betaupsilondelta.com/