Beware of “Weekly Deal” and “Weekly Deals” fake Facebook pages

Facebook users should be aware of a series of Facebook pages with titles like “Weekly Deal” as such pages are publishing a series of fake competition “like-farming” posts.

Like-farming is the process of tricking or exploiting Facebook users into liking and sharing Facebook posts, as well as luring them into following Facebook pages. And setting up fake competitions that implore readers to share posts to their timelines is a popular way of tricking users. We discuss it here.

A series of Facebook pages under the name “Weekly Deals”, “Weekly Deal” and “The Weekly Deal” are posting a series of fake competitions, often several each day, aimed at luring Facebook users into following their page. The pages are sharing each other’s posts, suggesting they are all owned by the same spammer, or network of spammers.

It is likely that previous spammy pages we’ve reported on, including the Daily Deal Facebook page, was also operated by the same people.

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In many cases, the posts contain links to third party websites where visitors are told to “verify their participation”. However these websites are spammy marketing webpages designed to steal the personal information of those that visit them and subsequently target them with more spam. On at least one post visitors are told to go to weekly-deals2017.com.

To confirm, the competitions on these Facebook pages are not real, and act as bait to lure their followers to spammy, third party marketing companies that are designed to trick visitors into entering subscriptions they don’t need or to harvest their personal information so they can be spammed.

Once again we find ourselves reminding the Facebook community to never to interact with spammy Facebook pages that post constant streams of “share this post and win this prize” type posts that we so often encounter on the social networking website, and never complete surveys of questionnaires to get a prize. These posts are never worth the hassle, and if you follow the instructions on the posts, you will end up with spam on your newsfeed, your email, your phone, your postal address and you may even wind up getting charged for unwanted subscriptions.