Monday 1 July 2013

URGENT - another Facebook scam competition!

At the weekend, word got around about a scam competition offering huge prizes on an Argos Facebook page. The page was NOT Argos's own page, and when the real Argos heard about it they posted a warning to users. The fake page closed, but was that the end of the matter?

No, now a fake Tesco page has popped up. Once again, they are offering some very tempting prizes - 15  55" TVs - as a "little thank you" for liking and sharing the competition.


A little thank you? It sounds like a blooming BIG thank you to me - or it would do, if there were any TVs on offer at all!

But there aren't. It is a fake page and what is known as a like-farming scam. The scammer are offering highly attractive prizes, in the hope of collecting as many likes as possible. They will then sell the page, complete with likes, on the black market to the kind of business that can't legitimately tout for likes all of their own. So if you like a page that is running a competition like this, you may suddenly find your pages feed full of posts about something unpleasant, shocking or even illegal, something you (hopefully) have absolutely no interest in at all.

How can you tell a page is fake? First of all, look at the name. The real name Tesco has already been taken, but the scammers have got round this by adding a full stop at the end - very easy to overlook, especially in the excitement of thinking you have won a TV.

Next, look at the number of likes. The real Tesco would have far more than 886 likes! In fact they have well over a million.

Then look at the page in general. This page really doesn't look right, does it? There are no posts about anything but the competition, they only joined Facebook a few hours ago yet mention "last month's winners", there are no customer complaints or interactions - it's not just a fake, it's a very bad fake!

Never let the lure of a possible big prize make your common sense fly out of the window, or you could find yourself being sucked into a scam that could turn out to be very nasty!

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