Just in case? Why participating in fake Facebook giveaways is dangerous

Whether they’re asking you to like and share a Facebook post to win a “luxury RV” or click a link to get a free $80 Walmart voucher, the world’s largest social networking site is flush with fake giveaways and competition.

And while many of us many enter them “just in case” they are true and “what harm can they really do?” the reality is that participating in them is likely to make you the target for spammers, or worse, cyber crooks.

So how do they put you at risk? That can depend on which variant of the fake competition scam you’ve encountered.

For example, the free prize for clicking a link variant.

One of the most common examples is when links are shared by your Facebook friends that appear on your newsfeed. They will say that you can claim your prize – for example a gift card for a particular brand – by simply clicking the link. Such links (example above) will typically lead to spammy marketing websites that are not affiliated with any brand, and that are designed to harvest your personal information, including your phone number, address and email.

This information is subsequently sold to other marketing companies and used to target you with unsolicited marketing information, meaning lots of spam to your phone and your email address.

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It’s also not outside the realm of possibility that the information could also be sold to crooks, who – armed with your name, address and other personal information – could try and launch a targeted scam against you.

The marketing websites these links lead to will also usually ask you to share them on your own Facebook timeline, thus spreading them to your friends too. This means not only do you put your own personal information at risk, you’re leading your friends to the same scheme, putting their information at risk too.

Then there is the share this post to win a prize variant.

Posts often spread on Facebook asking you to like and share a post as well as like page to win a prize. Often these prizes may be expensive items like a “luxury RV” or “Disney cruise”. However they’re posted by seemingly random Facebook pages, and not the Facebook pages belonging to the relevant brand (which you would expect if the promotion was legitimate.)

Since Facebook users are only asked to like and share a Facebook post and follow a page, we often hear the “what’s the harm?” justification used in these cases. But under the right circumstances, this can still be potentially harmful. In many cases, Facebook users who like and share these fake competition posts are contacted by the page owners through Facebook Messenger and told they have won the prize.

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However the page owners are crooks, and they are trying to exploit the user’s eagerness to obtain their prize. They can use this to extract personal information from the Facebook user which can be used to target them with further scams, or even lull the Facebook user into paying a small “upfront fee” in order to get their prize in what is advance feed fraud. We discuss this scheme in more detail here.

Again, since Facebook users are sharing these posts onto their own timeline as initially instructed, they are again spreading these scams to their friends.

And since they are also instructed to follow the Facebook page that made the post, they can be exposed to all sorts of scams in their newsfeed in the future.

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It is clear that real harm can arise when entering fake competition posts or links on Facebook, and not only do they put you at risk, they are also likely to put your friends at risk too. This should be more than enough to stop entering such “competitions” just in case they are real. Only stick to promotions that appear on the legitimate (blue ticked) Facebook pages and websites belonging to brands. You can learn more about the differences between fake and legitimate competitions on Facebook here.

If you want to hear about two real life examples of what can go wrong when you participate in these fake giveaways, we interviewed to people who fell victim to such scams after entering them “just in case” they were the real deal.