No, that company isn’t giving away gift coupons on Facebook for their anniversary

Cyber crooks are trying to trick Facebook users into clicking spammy links, sharing posts and following pages by telling them a popular brand is giving away free products to celebrate an anniversary.

Most popularly these posts claim those free products come in the form of a free gift coupon.

This is a popular form of Facebook like-farming, whereas crooks are attempting to trick Facebook users into engaging with their content – for example clicking a link, sharing their posts and/or liking their Facebook page. Despite the claims made by these posts (examples below) there are no free products or gift vouchers on offer and the brand is not celebrating their anniversary.

These schemes can be a particularly profitable venture for crooks. By tricking victims into clicking links, they are referring victims to spammy third party marketing websites that will pay the crooks for each victim that hands over their personal details, which results in that victim getting bombarded with marketing calls and spam.

Posts that request users share posts and follow Facebook pages can in turn give the crooks lots of reach to launch more serious scams, such as identity theft or even to trick victims into sending money to get their prize.

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Should the crooks not want to do the scams themselves, there are always places they can sell these Facebook pages elsewhere on the Internet, either to criminals or marketing companies.

As such, it is imperative that Facebook users avoid interacting with these sorts of posts and sharing them with their friends.

To avoid these scams, always check the page that is making the post to see if it is the official Facebook page of the brand in question. Official Facebook pages are denoted with a blue tick. However from our experience, all Facebook posts claiming to offer gift coupons for an anniversary for sharing a Facebook post are like-farming scams.

If you see a Facebook post that claims a popular brand are giving away freebies such as gift vouchers to celebrate a particular anniversary, then it is a scam!

You can learn more about like-farming here.