A series of spammy competition posts are spreading across Facebook that assert readers can win a vacation to destinations like the Maldives or Bali are spreading across the social media website.
Many of these posts have been created by newly created Facebook pages that have created “life event” posts that ask you to either share the post to enter or visit an external website to register for the free vacation.
An example of these posts can be seen below –
Win a Vacation! Limited time, enter now!
within the next 24 hours we’re jetting one person off to the Maldives along with 3 friends staying in one of our 5 star villas + $3,500 spending cash. Want to win? Just share this post, one share will be chosen at complete random. The winner will be announced, like our page for updates
How would you like to win a vacation? Well we’re giving you that chance.
Simply share this post then go here: goingouutto.com for a chance to win.
Winners are notified, like our page for updates.
Within the next 24 hours we’re jetting one person off to Bali along with 3 friends staying in one of our 5 star villas + $3,000 spending cash. Want to win? Just share this post, one share will be chosen at complete random. The winner will be announced, like our page for updates
These are just another example of spammy Facebook giveaways designed to make money for the spammers creating these Facebook posts.
Initially the posts may claim in order to enter the competition, the reader needs to simply share the post with their Facebook friends – something which incidentally is against Facebook’s terms of service regarding promotions.
However this is likely to be edited at a later point to include a link to an external marketing website that are designed to harvest the personal information of those who sign up to register. These are websites specifically designed to get your personal contact information and then target you with spammy offers, in any way open to them.
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Essentially, in order to stand a chance of winning anything (and those chances are extremely slim) you have to make yourself the target for unsolicited spam by giving away your contact information, including email, postal address and phone number. It is likely that many of these marketing companies will simply never give anything away, meaning your chances of winning anything are near enough zero.
One of these “offers” floating across Facebook promoting a chance of winning a holiday to the Maldives sent us to a website with the following [very] small print –
This present sweepstake/competition is carried out with the objective to incorporate your personal information in the marketing database, property of Aldaniti International Network LTD. Should you not wish that your personal information forms part of this mentioned database, we kindly ask you not to participate in this competition/sweepstake. Furthermore, if you do not inform us otherwise, your participation in this sweepstake is automatically treated as your permission to include your personal information in our sponsors databases. Should you oppose to your personal information forms part of these databases mentioned above, please click here;
Upon reading their terms of entry, the competition doesn’t sound too appealing. However the spammers who set up the Facebook pages and posts advertising vacations to places like the Maldives or Bali are getting paid every time they lure someone into signing up for these offers.
Watch out for these types of offers. The Facebook pages that promote these spammy offers use a variety of like-farming techniques to go viral across the site, including asking readers to like and share their posts.
The only people who stand to gain anything from these offers are the spammers themselves.
