The photo hijacked by fake Facebook competition spammers

The photo below is of a man named Fred Felleman in 2015 while working with Friends of the Earth. He is posing with several boxes representing 100,000 petition signatures addressed to Christine Duffy, the President of Carnival Cruise Lines.

The signatures represented by the boxes were petitioning Carnival Cruise Lines to update their wastewater treatment systems.

However if you’ve seen the photo, it is most likely under a completely different context.

And that’s because this photo is one that has been frequently stolen by the same network of social media spammers and used in a variety of fake competition/giveaway scams that plague Facebook every single day.

Spammers use this photo to help support their stories about companies giving away big prizes to anyone who shares the photo across Facebook.

For example, here is the photo used to promote a fake P&O Cruises scam, where Felleman is incorrectly identified as Mark Graham and P&O logo crudely “photoshopped” onto the image. The image claims users must like the page and share it to win free cruise tickets.

Another scam claimed Felleman was actually Mark Sutton, the CEO of Center Parcs, and again a logo was added to the image, and again the scammers were trying to lure Facebook users into liking the page and sharing it for freebies.

The photo has actually been used in countless fake competitions that target a number of different brands, and Fred Felleman has been incorrectly identified as dozens of different people. These are all like-farming competition scams. Like-farming refers to the deception used to lure Facebook users into liking and sharing Facebook posts, as well as luring users into following spammy Facebook pages.

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We discuss why you should never interact with such like-farming posts in more detail in our post here, including you should never engage with them “just in case”. Additionally you can join our Facebook group dedicated to finding and reporting fake competitions on Facebook here.

The bottom line, of course, is if you see this photo on a post purporting to be a competition or giveaway, it’s a scam.