Posts on Facebook claim that supermarket Morrisons is giving away free vouchers for sharing and commented on a Facebook post.
The posts also ask users to claim their prize by clicking a link.
Facebook posts that claim you can win goods like vouchers just for liking or sharing are common on the Internet’s most popular social media platform. However, such posts are typically scams designed at luring Facebook users to third party data harvesting websites.
Examples of these types of scams are below.
Morrisons will officially be single-use plastic bags free by 2021, and we are celebrating by doing something special!! Every single person who has shaᴦed then commented by 11pm tonight will receive one of these bags containing a £35 voucher and goodies.
Make sure you enter here: https://bit.ly/35B9ET2
£35 voucher is valid in-store only!
Such posts are like-farming posts. Like-farming refers to the various techniques that spammers use to trick Facebook users into engaging with Facebook posts by using deception, manipulation or exploitation.
In this case, since the spammers are pretending to be UK supermarket Morrisons (and there are no vouchers or freebies being given away) then the posts above are like-farming using deception.
The idea of these posts is to lure Facebook users to websites outside of Facebook that are known to collect (harvest) personal information from visitors. While the Facebook user may believe they are signing up to win or collect free supermarket vouchers, in reality they are handing over their personal information to spammers, which is likely to be used to spam the user, or worse, use their information to commit identity theft.
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When we clicked on some of these links, we were sent to the usual myriad of data harvesting websites that attempted to collect sensitive information and even asked for bank account information, meaning those who fall for this scam could wind up the victims of identity theft.
As always, there are some sure ways to spot these types of scams.
First, the Facebook pages that post them are not the official Facebook pages of the respective brands. For instance, these posts are not from the blue tick verified Facebook page belonging to Morrisons.
Secondly, Facebook’s Page Transparency Tool reveals the Facebook pages are only a handful of days or weeks old.
Thirdly, the Facebook pages attempt to lure users off of Facebook and on to third party websites, and such websites do not belong to the respective brand. In this instance, the websites do not belong to Morrisons.
Read this post when we clicked through on one of these scams to see what happened.