Facebook post offers ‘Center Parcs lodge holiday for 4’ – Fact Check
Another Facebook post is claiming to offer a Center Parcs holiday for four people for those who share the post on the social network.
The post claims a non-refundable holiday was cancelled and as such is being given away for free. A screenshot of the post can be seen below.
Big announcement. A non-refundable holiday was cancelled for 4 in a Lodge for 7 nights, share in the next 9 hours to get it free
A comment on the post made by the page – which appears to be Center Parcs Longleat Forest – also urges Facebook users to confirm their entry by submitting their email by clicking a link to a third party website.
Our regular readers will know that this is just a completely typical fake competition like-farming scam with the aim of luring Facebook users to spammy third party marketing websites that exist to harvest the personal information of visitors. We’ve discussed this scam time and time again, and so rarely to these spammers change the nature of this particular scam.
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The claim that a service or product has been cancelled and is being given away for free is often used by these spammers to make their schemes appear more legitimate.
What is also typical is the comment on the post (or within the post itself) urging users to click a link to confirm their entry, only for this link to lead to a spammy data-harvesting website.
When we clicked the link, we were forwarded to a spammy website called giveaways-uk.com, where the terms of conditions claimed that those who signed up could expect to receive adverts (unsolicited marketing content) through phone, SMS, email and postal address.
And of course this is no free Center Parcs holiday and the Facebook page doesn’t belong to Center Parcs. It’s all just a ruse to get Facebook users to spammy websites.
We don’t recommend engaging with these posts. For more information on fake Facebook competitions, click here.
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