A viral Facebook post is spreading across the social networking platform that claims to offer a free 10 night break in the Maldives for Easter from Thomas Cook.
The page that made the post is called Thomas Cook. The post has accumulated over 100,000 shares in its first 12 hours. A screenshot can be seen below.
To celebrate Easter this week we have decided someone who shares by 9pm tonight will get a free Maldives 10 night holiday for two
Of course this is a typical fake Facebook competition scam, with all the usual red flags present. The page has made a comment on the post urging users to head to a website which is actually a data harvesting website that collects contact information from its visitors in order to spam them.
How to spot these scams…
As we stated above, there are a number of red flags that are typically present with these sorts of scams.
– The page is brand new. Clicking on Facebook page transparency tool reveals the page is only 1 day old. As such, it clearly isn’t the official Thomas Cook page, rather an imposter page.
Sponsored Content. Continued below...
– The page doesn’t have the blue verification tick that Facebook gives to official pages, again demonstrating that it’s a fake Facebook page.
– The page is linking to an external website that is nothing to do with Thomas Cook. In the comments section, the page claims to enter the competition you must click a link to verify your entry. However this link leads to a data harvesting website.
We’ve warned of these types of scams countless times of this site, yet people continue to fall for them. Falling for these scams can be dangerous. We have described a number of real life stories about people who fell for these schemes and what happened here and here.
Learn more about fake Facebook competition in our blog post here.