Despite what you have seen on Facebook, you’re certainly not going to receive a free Samsung 65 inch curved TV from Argos. Sorry.
Fake Facebook competition and giveaway scams are rife when the festive season is upon us, and despite being a relatively seasoned ruse, these scams never seem to fade away.
Fraudulent Facebook giveaways/competitions are a popular phenomenon, especially as Christmas approaches and everyone is on the lookout for a good deal. Only a week prior did fake posts purporting to give away a Mercedes Benz go viral.
Scammers are always looking for people to both share their posts and Like their Facebook pages and setting up fake competitions on Facebook is an effective way of doing that, luring users into sharing their content across the social website.
A particularly successful scam over the last week [from the time of writing] has promised to offer those who share a post a free Samsung 65 inch HD Ultra curved TV, purportedly on offer from the Argos Facebook page.
However the page posting the messages, despite being called Argos, belongs to anyone but. It’s a fake page, posting fake messages so you’ll Like the page, accumulating followers to a fake page which can help kick start further scams at a later date.
The posts also lure readers to an external website that tricks victims into completing spammy surveys which also make money for the scammers, and cause the victim to be the victim of copious amounts of spam! (Read more about survey scams here)
Liking and Sharing these posts help them spread across Facebook and doing so puts your friends at risk as well.
We have an article here outlining how fake Facebook giveaways and competitions work so it’s definitely worth a read, and if you have a friend who is constantly falling for these scams send them the link to help them out!
Thanks for reading! But before you go… as part of our latest series of articles on how to earn a little extra cash using the Internet (without getting scammed) we have been looking into how you can earn gift vouchers (like Amazon vouchers) using reward-per-action websites such as SwagBucks. If you are interested we even have our own sign-up code to get you started. Want to learn more? We discuss it here. (Or you can just sign-up here and use code Nonsense70SB when registering.)
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