Is Cadbury giving away free products for sharing a Facebook post? Fact Check
Posts on social media site Facebook claim that confectionery company Cadbury’s is giving away a free chocolate hamper or basket to Facebook users when they share and like a post on Facebook.
LIKE-FARMING \ DATA HARVESTING SCAM
Many such posts claim this is to celebrate an anniversary. Examples of messages as seen on Facebook are below.
To celebrate 196 years of Cadbury we’ll be giving every share a free chocolate Cadbury basket delivered to your door within 48hrs.
Cadbury rewards everyone with a free chocolate hamper to celebrate 194 years of quality service when you share this post!
These posts are an example of Facebook like-farming. Like-farming refers to posts on social media designed to manipulate, exploit or deceive Facebook users into engaging with them (such as commenting, liking and sharing.) Since there is no free Cadbury’s products on offer for sharing a Facebook post, such posts are using deception to lure users into engaging with them.
Like-farming is a method used by spammers to help their posts proliferate across a particular social media platform, in this case Facebook. This is because engagement such as commenting and sharing helps content spread between social media users.
Such posts are often used in conjunction with data harvesting scams. This is where users are claimed that in order to “claim” or “verify” their prize, they must first visit an external website, either by clicking a link on the post or clicking a button on the Facebook page that made the post. However, these websites are marketing websites that are designed to harvest personal information of visitors.
This is likely to lead to the visitor being spammed, or worse, find themselves the victim of identity theft or unwittingly enrolled in expensive subscription based services.
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Like-farming scams of this ilk are popular, and target a variety of other popular brands other than Cadbury’s. We regularly remind our readers that Facebook posts from unverified Facebook pages offering free products are scams and should be avoided.
As with most Facebook like-farming and data harvesting scams, there are several red flags that should warn a Facebook user that such posts are not legitimate.
For example, the Facebook pages that make these posts lack the blue verification tick that indicates a Facebook page is the official page of a particular brand.
The Page Transparency tool, available on a particular page, will tell you when a Facebook page was created. Like-farming posts are typically made from newly created Facebook pages.
If a promotion leads to an external website outside of Facebook, these will lead to the websites of the brands involved in a promotion, not websites that you have never heard of.
If a Facebook post emphasizes that you must share a Facebook post to win or enter a promotion, then it is probably not genuine.
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It is important never to sign-up to such scams. Not only are you giving up your privacy and allowing yourself to become the target of spammers, you’re also putting your friends at risk too considering the first step of these schemes was to share the same link to your friends on Facebook.
Never share links to claim prizes, and only trust giveaways or promotions run from the official social media channels or websites of the relevant companies, not unknown, third party websites.