Social media users should be aware of a surge of links claiming to offer a free $100 Chipotle Mexican Grill gift card.
The spammy links appear to have been timed to coincide with National Avocado Day. Avocados are the primary ingredient to Guacamole dip, which is popular in Mexican cuisine and as such often features on menus of places like Chipotle Mexican Grill.
Social media users who click on links like the one pictured below are taken to a webpage asking them to share a link with their friends on social media, which leads to the same page they’ve just landed on, thus helping the scam spread prolifically across the Internet.
Get a $100 Chipotle Card
Get your card – (1) per person
Once social media users share the link to their friends, they are forwarded to marketing surveys, which are designed to harvest a user’s personal information, and in many cases require visitors to sign up for expensive subscriptions. Such marketing websites will then bombard visitors with spam.
And of course, there are no free gift cards on offer here. It’s just bait to lure Internet users to spammy marketing websites. Such fake giveaways and promotions are prolific on social media websites, especially Facebook.
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Chipotle do have a legitimate promotion (in the US) on National Avocado Day, where customers can enter the AVOCADO offer code when placing an order online or on the mobile app to get a free side of guacamole. That promotion is promoted on the US Chipotle Facebook page and on the Chipotle.com website, which is how consumers can know the promotion is legitimate.
However links promoting $100 gift cards are fake. They are not promoted on the official social media channels of Chipotle Mexican Grill, nor on the Chipotle.com website. Instead, such links lead to spammy, recently registered domains that are not affiliated with Chipotle at all.
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Those who fell for the scam and gave away their details can expect to receive unsolicited communication through phone, SMS and email.
If you did fall for the scam, please consider removing the links you posted so your social media friends don’t fall for the same scam too, and remember that if it appears to be too good to be true, it probably is.