Free 2015 first class Qantas Australia tickets? Not so fast…

A spate of fake Facebook pages and posts claiming to be from “Qantas Australia” are purporting to be giving away free first class tickets, and plenty of Facebook users are falling for them.

These pages followe the typical “fake giveaway” template used by many fake Facebook giveaways scams and claim to give users a chance to – for example – get a year’s supply of first class tickets in 2015 with the Qantas airline, or to get first class tickets for you “and 5 friends”. See the screen-grabs below.

Users are first instructed to Like and Share the Facebook post, spreading it across the Facebook stratosphere.

In reality these newly created Facebook Pages have nothing to do with Qantas, and there are no tickets on offer here. These scams work by fooling thousands of Facebook users to share a post, which in turn accumulates followers for the Facebook Page that makes the posts.

That Page can then be used to launch any number of different scams in the future, given that the large amount of followers it acquired through the fake promotional posts gives the Pages a large reach. These scams can also be used to trick Facebook users into parting with sensitive information about themselves, or used to lure Facebook users to malicious webpages outside of Facebook, including malware ridden websites or survey scams.

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Luckily in many cases various hoax-busting resources requested their users report the page, and (unlike many other similar scams) some of these prolific examples of this scam were eventually shut down, but many new (and near identical scams) pop up every day, so always be aware.

We discuss fake Facebook competition posts on our YouTube channel here, or read our full article on Facebook giveaway/competition spam here.

Have you seen scams taking advantage of the Qantas brand? Let us know below.