Facebook survey scams are on the rise in December, duping users into parting with their personal information in order to get freebies that don’t exist.
As Christmas approaches the prospect of winning some free gift vouchers is certainly a tempting idea! Especially if all you have to do to win these vouchers is to, say, join an Event on Facebook and perhaps invite some friends to do the same as well.
Well this is something that Facebook scammers are taking advantage of in the run up to the festive season. We’re seeing an influx of fake Facebook pages and scams that purport to offer freebies, such as gift vouchers, but in reality are duping Facebook users into joining worthless groups, completing pointless surveys and to add insult to injury, getting those same users to get their friends to do the exact same thing as well!
These scams work by getting Facebook users join Pages or Events on Facebook. Once a user joins they are told to invite their friends before proceeding. One they do this they are then sent to an external website that asserts that in order to get their freebie, a user must first complete a survey that asks for all of the user’s personal information.
Once this is done then the user finds out there is no real freebie an they’ve been taken for a ride. And of course, in the ensuing hours, so will many of their friends who they’ve just invited to the same scam.
All of these Pages and Events are fake. No real company gives out free stuff for inviting your friends to a Page or Event and then completing surveys or “reward programs.” All that happens is you give away plenty of your personal information, have said information sold to other numerous marketing companies, get spammed a lot more than you did previously and get told off by your friends for inviting them to this mockery.
Watch out for these scams. There are a few going around targeting Argos at the moment.
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