A series of spammy Facebook pages set up in the Mercedes brand name are trying to lure people into liking and sharing their posts under the belief they stand a chance of winning a free car.
The posts claim that you must like and share a Facebook post to win a car. One post claims you can win a Mercedes Benz E63 AMG, while another purports to be offering a C-Class Sedan.
Examples of the posts can be seen below –
This will be the first time on this year we at Mercedes will be give away 2 Beautiful Mercedes Benz E63 AMG 2016 to two winners that we will randomly select on Jaunary 30 2017
Want to join this amazing giveaway for a chance to own a brand new Benz simply folow the steps below to enter our competition:
: Like This Page
: Like This Post
: Comment which color you would like?(White or Black)
: Share On Your Wall
I am the Owner of this Mercedes.
One Lucky Winner Will Be Announced On February 1st !!
Step 1) Like this post
Step 2) Share on your wall
Step 3) Comment Done
Good Luck to everyone !
These pages are just the latest in a series of scams designed at luring people into engaging with Facebook posts and helping them spread virally across the social networking website. It’s called like-farming, where spammers set up pages designed to exploit Facebook users through deception or manipulation into both liking and sharing posts.
The aim of these scams is to acquire as many followers for their Facebook pages as possible so they can later be targeted with other types of more profitable spam, or even scams like identity theft.
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We discuss like-farming is more detail here and explain the various disguises it can take. We also discuss this type of fake competition like-farming through this link here which we recommend giving a read if you haven’t already.
Remember, to avoid these scams, do not engage with Facebook pages that do not represent a actual brand of the product that is offered as a freebie. The Facebook pages in these cases are not marked with the blue verification tick, and a simple scroll down the pages reveals these pages have only been created days prior to posting these spammy “offers”.
Also, any post imploring you to share it on your timeline to quality for winning is likely to be a scam since this is a violation of Facebook’s terms of service regarding promotions.
