Fake Facebook post claims to offer free holiday for 4 to Tenerife

A Facebook post is going viral claiming to offer a free Tenerife holiday for 4 people from First Choice UK for those that share and comment on the post.

The post also directs users to an external webpage in order to “verify their entry” into the competition. A screenshot of the post is below.

!!IMPORTANT NEWS!! I’m Sarah Jackman a Manager at First Choice, I’m at our head office with this package containing tickets for a Tenerife holiday for 4.
Want it? I’m going to pick a random person at 11:45pm tomorrow night so if you’ve shared, commented on this photo and liked our page you can get it FREE!

Our regular readers will know that this is a fake competition scam. Such scams are extremely popular on the Facebook social network, and are designed to lure Facebook users to spammy third party marketing websites that exist to collect personal information from visitors and then spam them.

The Facebook post is fake, and has nothing to do with First Choice. And needless to say, there is also no free holiday to Tenerife for four on offer. In fact the image of the young lady in the photo of the post also has nothing to do with First Choice. In fact a reverse image search reveals she works for Thomson Holidays (now rebranded as TUI.) Her image has simply been taken by the spammers to illustrate the scam.

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The fake competition is identifiable as such through a number of different ways –

– The Facebook page that made the post, First Choice UK, isn’t the real First Choice Facebook page, which is identified by the Facebook “blue tick” confirmation mark, which all big brands will have on their Facebook pages.

– A brief scroll down the page reveals only a handful of posts going back a few weeks. As such it is a newly created page.

– The post asks you to share it on your timeline to enter the competition.

– The post urges you to click a link to an external website that doesn’t lead to the official First Choice website.

All of the above should be considered significant red flags that point to an Internet scam. Those who click the link on the post will be directed to marketing websites that aim to harvest your personal information in order to bombard you with spam via email, post and even through SMS and phone.

We always recommend never interacting with these types of Facebook posts. You can read more about this type of scam in our post here.