Can you win a Thomas Cook holiday to Tenerife for sharing a Facebook post? Fact Check
A Facebook post claims Thomas Cook are offering a Tenerife holiday for four people to those that share the post.
According to the post, a customer cancelled their holiday which is the reason for the giveaway. An example of the post can be seen below.
One of our customers cancelled a non-refundable Tenerife holiday for 4 in Aug 2019. Someone who shares by 11pm Jan 26th gets it free.
At the time of writing, the post has accumulated almost a quarter of a million shares.
The Facebook post is a typical Facebook fake competition scam. Such scams exist to trick Facebook users into visiting spammy or malicious websites. As with most of these types of scams, the post contains a comment urging Facebook users to click a Sign Up link, which will lead to spammy third party marketing websites that will harvest personal information of visitors in order to spam them.
Firstly, the Facebook page that made the post – Thomas Cook Fans – doesn’t belong to Thomas Cook. This is demonstrated by three things…
1. The Facebook page doesn’t have the blue tick denoting an official Facebook page belonging to a brand.
2. The Facebook page is only a handful of months old, and has only made a handful of posts.
3. The Facebook page only has a few thousand followers.
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The real Thomas Cook page has been around for many years, has a blue tick and has millions of followers, as do most big brands.
Secondly, Facebook posts that claim you can win an expensive prize such as a free holiday just for sharing a Facebook post are most likely going to be scams.
Thirdly, as is common with these scams, the page has commented on the post to try and direct Facebook users to a Sign Up link on the page. This link leads to a website not associated with Thomas Cook, and does not lead to their official website.
The website that the link leads to is a spammy website that will try and harvest your personal information, so spammers can contact you and potentially scam you. There is no “cancelled holiday” being given away. It is merely a story to lure Facebook users into sharing the post.
Our readers are strongly urged to avoid sharing or interacting with these sorts of posts. We have a full article on spotting these scams here, and another one outlining why you shouldn’t interact with them “just in case”.
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