Links offering 2 free tickets for Southwest Airlines are spreading across Facebook luring many users into visiting an external webpage which links to various spammy marketing offers.
The link appears like the one below and claims the tickets are being given away by Southwest Airlines to celebrate their 90th anniversary.
Get 2 Free Southwest Airline Tickets on its 90th Anniversary!
Get Your Tickets now! and Fly any where!
The links are scams, and have nothing to do with Southwest Airlines. Firstly, Southwest Airlines was founded in the 1960s so certainly have not reached their 90th anniversary at the time of writing.
Secondly, upon clicking these links spreading across Facebook, visitors are taken to spammy marketing webpages that assert you need to complete a series of questionnaires and surveys to “unlock” your free tickets. However these are designed to harvest personal information from the visitor, who are then targeted with more scams and spam via the information they volunteer to these marketing webpages.
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Visitors are also told to share the webpage on their Facebook timeline and send the link directly to their Facebook friends, which helps the scam spread further across the social networking website.
And of course there are no free Southwest Airline tickets on offer here. That is simply just bait used to lure visitors to these websites in the first place. The links have absolutely nothing to do with the airline and Facebook users are warned not to click these spammy links and recommend to your friends to delete them if they have shared them on their own timelines.
Also watch out for similar scams offering tickets for other brands including Vue Cinemas that are also spreading.
