Various Facebook pages purporting to offer free tickets and vouchers have begun popping up on Facebook once again.
Facebook Page/Event giveaway scams have been one of the most prolific and successful cons on Facebook for many years now, and a recent surge in such scams has highlighted that there are still plenty of Facebook users naïve enough to fall for them.
One popular example includes a Facebook page offering free DisneyLand tickets (see image below). A post on that page asserts that because the theme park have had tickets returned that apparently means they cannot resell them, so are giving them away to anyone who Likes and Shares the post.
Of course baiting users into Liking and Sharing the post is the spammers way of spreading their hoax across Facebook, and as the post circulates amongst Facebook friends the Page inevitably accumulates many followers.
Of course many Facebook users help circulate the scam to their friends “just in case” it might be true, under the thinking that they have nothing to lose. However these users do not realise that following these Pages can put you at risk of being exposed to potentially harmful spam posts. Such spam Pages can accumulate many hundreds of thousands of followers and future spammy/scam posts that the Page makes will reach many of those followers. When you Like and Share a spam post you are not only exposing yourself to spam but you are putting your Facebook friends at risk too.
Remember that Facebook Pages that purport to giveaway freebies just for Liking/Sharing posts are nearly always scams, since conditioning entry to any type of giveaway by Sharing a post is against Facebooks terms of service regarding promotional content. These types of scams are also often used with affiliate survey scams that make scammers money every time they trick a user into completing a survey.
Any Facebook promotions that are legitimate will originate from the official Facebook Pages of the companies involved in the promotion. In the case of our example above, the Facebook Page was not that of DisneyLand, rather a Facebook Page that was created last Friday, confirming that this is nothing more than a scam.
You can read more about Facebook giveaway scams and hoaxes here.
