Don’t fall for Facebook posts offering golden envelopes with free cruises

A series of Facebook posts are spreading across the site claiming to offer “20 amazing golden envelopes” containing a free cruise for those that like and share the post and click Sign Up.

Different versions of these posts exist. One targeted the P&O Cruise brand, while another targeted Carnival Cruise. However they are all scams that are concerned with making their posts go viral and luring Facebook users to spammy marketing webpages.

Examples read –

I’m Micky Arison, a CEO at Carnival Cruise and I have 20 amazing golden envelopes and all of them have a Carnival Cruise for 4 inside. I’ve decided to give them all away in 12hours and all you need to do is share.
Don’t forget to give us a thumbs up.
If you comment you’ll get a extra entry

Hello I have 20 amazing golden envelopes and all of them have a P&O Cruise for 3 inside. Share if you want to get one! Don’t forget to click ‘Sign Up’ at the top of our page to validate your entry for our giveaway.

These are essentially your very typical fake Facebook competition scam. They exist to accumulate followers to a Facebook page, which usually then tries to trick those followers into visiting spammy marketing websites that are designed to collect your personal information in order to spam you.

Those who click on the links to “sign up” for their free carnival prize will be directed to other spammy website offers that are only interested in collecting information such as your name, email, phone number and address. Once they have that information, you can expect to be bombarded with marketing calls, letters, texts and emails.

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And of course, these free “golden envelopes” aren’t real. In fact they are the envelopes used during the 2016 Oscars ceremony. However the spammers have hastily added carnival logos using digital software. You can see the original photo of the envelopes here.

Don’t fall for these scams. You’re not going to win a free carnival trip just for liking and sharing a post on Facebook. If carnival brands do orchestrate promotions on social media, they will come from the official social media pages of that brand that will be denoted by a blue Facebook verification tick.

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Additionally, if you’re being asked to share a link to enter, it’s more than likely a scam since this is against Facebook’s terms of service, and if you’re privacy settings are what they should be, the page admin have no way of knowing if you shared their link or not!

Here are 3 reasons why you shouldn’t fall for these scams “just in case”.