US actor Tyler Perry has addressed the surge of Facebook scams using his name to trick social media users into giving away personal information.
On his official ‘blue ticked’ Facebook page, Tyler Perry published a video of himself telling his millions of followers that he does not give anything away on Facebook.
We have previously reported on the surge of fake Facebook pages using his name to attract followers. Such fake pages use Perry’s identity to trick users into believing the actor is giving away large sums of money or high prize items such as cars to those who like and share a Facebook post published by the fake page.
This is called like-farming, the process of accumulating likes, shares and followers using deception or exploitation. Often the Facebook pages try and lure social media users to third party spammy marketing websites which attempt to harvest personal information from visitors in order to spam them.
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Spammers will often set up Facebook pages under the identities of well-known celebrities to trick social media users, and Tyler Perry is often targeted. In his video, Perry stated that his team take down “10, 20, 30 pages every day”, demonstrating the popularity of these fake pages.
It’s very unlikely that any celebrity or company is going to give away high value prizes to Facebook users just for liking and sharing a Facebook post, and as such we recommend avoiding such schemes. Also it is worth remembering that celebrities and companies typically have verified Facebook pages which are denoted with a blue tick. Pages that lack this verification tick are most likely impostor pages that could be trying to scam you.