Free Virgin Airways ticket scam spreads on Facebook

Facebook posts claiming to give away Complimentary First Class Flights from Virgin Airways for those that like, share and comment on the photo are yet another example of a survey scam.

This is a classic version of your typical Facebook competition scam, of which we have seen numerous examples so far this year. In fact other airlines have also been used as bait including Qantas and South West Airlines.

The scam works in an identical fashion. It baits users into liking and sharing a Facebook post, thus spreading it across the social networking site. Once the post goes viral the scammers edit the post to include a link that leads to an external website and claim that in order to qualify for the prize, victims must first visit the external website.

A few examples of the posts that are spreading are below –

Attention vacation lovers! We are giving you the chance to win Complimentary First Class Flights to any destination of your choice world wide and $5000 spending money for you and up to 5 people ….

Today is an incredible day at Virgin Airlines as we are officially celebrating seating over 150 million passengers since 2014!! To celebrate we are giving away 500 FREE first class flights for the entire year to a few of our lucky fans!!

The website visitors are told to visit will commonly be a survey scam, meaning visitors are told to answer intrusive questionnaires that harvest a person’s personal details, making them the target for future scams and spam. These sites can also be involved with identity fraud as well. However these sites can also attempt to install malware onto a visitors computer as well.

The scammers behind it all will get paid every time they send over someone who is willing to give up their personal details to obtain free tickets that do not exist.

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And that is of course why they do it. Essentially the scammers are getting a commission [from third party companies that run the surveys] by tricking people into believing they will get something for free, when that is not the case.

It is important not to fall for these scams since they put you at risk of spam and if you follow the instructions and share the post on your Facebook newsfeed then you will be putting your own friends at risk too.

It is viral to lean how to spot these fake competition scams, and yo can do that by reading our article on fake Facebook competition scams and how to spot/avoid them.