Is Richards Branson giving away Cyprus holiday on Facebook? Fact Check

A post on Facebook is claiming to give away a Cyprus holiday for 2 for users who share and comment the post. The post appears to have been published by Virgin Holidays and features a photo of Sir Richard Branson holding up golden envelopes.

Comments on the post by the page that made the post also claim users must click the Sign Up link to enter the competition.

An example of the post is below.

Hello everyone, I’m Sir Richard Branson the founder of Virgin. Today I have some brilliant news, 25 random people who have shared then commented by 11pm tonight will each be getting one of these gold envelopes containing a Cyprus holiday for two! (Any Date)

Our regular readers (follow us on Facebook here if you’re not already) will already know that this is a fake post, and the photo of Sir Richard Branson is a digitally altered photo that has been used in a number of similar scams.

The post is another typical example of a fake Facebook like-farming competition, where crooks are attempting to bait Facebook users into sharing a post, which helps spread it across the social network. The crooks are also trying to lure users towards spammy marketing websites by asking them to click the Sign Up link.

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Those spammy websites are designed to harvest a visitor’s personal information, so the visitor can be targeted with unsolicited spam through their phone and email address. It is possible such sites could also sell those details to crooks who may try and launch targeted scams against the visitor.

And of course, none of this is really anything to do with Virgin. The Facebook page lacks the blue verification tick that the real Virgin Facebook page has, and the photo of Richard Branson is fake. You can see another example of this same photo being used only this time claiming it to be the CEO of Carnival Cruise.

We strongly recommend avoiding such scams. Sharing or commenting on these posts makes you – and your friends – vulnerable to crooks online. We discuss more about these scams here.