Links spreading on social media are purporting to offer readers a Tesco £100 off coupon.
The links, like the one below, appear to show an image of such a coupon offering £100 off any Tesco store with an expiry date of September 15th 2015. The link in the description reads “Back to School with a £100 Tesco Coupon”
Whilst this “Back to School” link claims to offer a Tesco coupon, many different links are currently spreading across social media targeting different stores, including Argos.
The links are not legitimate, as one could determine from the above example through September being spelt incorrectly.
Like many fake competition & giveaway scams that spread across social media every day, the links direct users to a webpage that urges visitors to share the webpage with their friends on Facebook as well as post the webpage link into Facebook groups that they are members of, helping the link spread across Facebook.
Once the visitor as performed all those tasks they are then instructed to complete spammy surveys that harvests a user’s personal information, leading to increased frequency of unsolicited communication.
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And once those surveys have been completed, it is only then that the visitor realises that the £100 coupon doesn’t actually exist. Only by then it is too late as they have already given their personal information to marketers, and the spammers who set up the fake giveaway have made a commission for referring the visitor to marketing companies.
Facebook giveaway scams are a constant threat on social media, and those who fall for them will typically end up receiving often copious amounts of spam through post and email, even through SMS.
And because they shared the link through their Facebook accounts, they are setting up their friends to fall for the same scam.
To learn more about how fake competitions or giveaways work on Facebook, click here.
