Watch out for fake Tyler Perry Facebook pages giving away money

Facebook users should avoid following or interacting with a number of fake Facebook pages claiming to be the voice of actor Tyler Perry, since they are like-farming scams.

Facebook scammers often use the lure of celebrities to lure victims into their social media scams, and some celebrities are used more than others. One popular celebrity that has a large number of fake Facebook pages made in his name is American star Tyler Perry. We’ve previously reported on a previous scam in 2017 that used both Perry and Oprah Winfrey to try and scam Facebook users on Facebook.

It seems scammers have used his name and image to create a large number of Facebook pages that are publishing posts claiming to give away large amounts of cash/prizes for those that follow the page as well as like and share the post. See the post below for an example.

This is like-farming, since the scammers are attempting to lure social media users into engaging with their posts using deception. The pages have nothing to do with Tyler Perry, and there are no prizes or money being given away. This is just bait to lure victims into following the fake pages and sharing their posts.

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How dangerous these types of scams can be depends on the scammer. Sometimes these pages and posts exist purely to trick Facebook users into following spammy Facebook pages, so they’ll see more spam appear on their newsfeed. However often these posts may contain links to spammy marketing webpages that harvest personal information, or even websites that try and commit more serious scams such as identity theft.

Alternatively, the pages may attempt to extort money from victims by contacting Facebook users who have engaged with the post and telling them they have won the prize but they first must pay an upfront fee or cost to obtain their prize. This is called advance fee fraud.

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Tyler Perry does have a Facebook page. Like nearly all Facebook pages belonging to well-known celebrities, it is Facebook ‘verified’, meaning it has a blue tick. It also has 13 million followers, it’s been active for many years and doesn’t post about giveaways. While Tyler Perry’s name and image is used with the scam we discuss here, scammers could potentially use any well known celebrity to target Facebook users.

We discuss more about fake competitions on Facebook in our post here and how they can be dangerous.