Fake Toby Carvery giveaway goes viral on Facebook

Posts on Facebook claim you can win a free Sunday Carvery courtesy of Toby Carvery for commenting on a Facebook post in celebration of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.

SCAM

An example of the post is below –

To celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee we will be sending everyone who’s typed ‘Done’ by Sunday a Carvery for 2 on us!

The post is a typical fake Facebook giveaway scam designed to lure Facebook users to third party marketing websites that harvest personal information for the purposes of spamming them.

Those who comment “Done” as per the post’s instructions will be urged to visit a website in order to “claim their voucher”.

However these links will not lead to anyone getting a voucher. These links lead to spammy marketing websites that use underhand techniques to lure visitors into handing over their contact information. That information is then used to spam people, or will be sold on to other marketing companies. In some cases this information can even be used in identity fraud scams or used to initiate targeting phishing scams.

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Neither the Facebook post nor the websites they direct to have anything to do with the real Toby Carvery Facebook page.

Using Facebook in this manner is called Facebook like-farming. This means using either exploitation or deception to lure users into engaging with a Facebook post. Since there are no vouchers being given away, in this case it is deception.

Red Flags…

• The Facebook page that published the post isn’t the Toby Carvery Facebook page. It doesn’t have the Facebook “blue tick” mark to show it’s a verified page.
• The Facebook Page Transparency Tool reveals the page was created only last year. The real (and verified) Toby Carvery page was created in 2009.
• The links to “verify your voucher” don’t link to the Toby Carvery website.
• Users are directed to third party offers from third party companies to “claim their prize”. Every single time a user is directed to these third party sign-up pages to “claim a prize”, it will be a scam.

We have more information on avoiding these types of fake competitions and giveaways in our post here.

Other similar scams are also floating around using the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee as bait, including fake posts claiming to be from Hungry Horse.

Don’t fall for these scams. They’re designed to harvest personal information from users who are too cavalier with their private data. Don’t let spammers in. If a ‘giveaway’ post isn’t from an official or verified social media channel, you should ignore it.