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Facebook scams offering free cars

I wouldn’t normally write a post about something like this for Engage Web. I would normally save this sort of thing for my personal blog, but this morning I saw that one of my friends had commented on this particular Facebook post, and it frightened me so much I had to share it.

While scrolling through my Facebook feed this morning, as thousands of others would have done, I saw the following image because one of my friends had commented on it. However, unlike many people who will have seen this page, I knew instantly it was a scam.

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Others are not so lucky. The Facebook Page, which I have reported to Facebook as a scam (so it might not exist for much longer), offers the following:

For the FIRST time in facebook history we are giving away 2 Audi R8 to two winners that we will select on December 21 completely at random.

Would you like to join this amazing giveaway for a chance to own a brand new AUDI? Simply follow the steps below to enter the competition :

Step 1) Likes this Page We Love V8 Cars.
Step 2) Like this Post
Step 3) Comment which color you want. (CREME OR SILVER)
Step 4) Share on your wall

The winners will be messaged via inbox message

Good Luck

At the time of writing this post, the page has approximately 40,000 comments and ‘likes’ on the post, with nearly 15,000 likes on the page – which in itself shows the people who have interacted with it haven’t actually read the rules set out to ‘win’ the Audi R8. Additionally, people have commented with colours other than ‘creme’ or ‘silver’ – which to be honest is to be expected. Anyone who is gullible enough to believe this might be true is also foolhardy enough to misread what they’ve been asked to do in the first place.

So, for the avoidance of any doubt, the page is NOT going to give away an Audi R8. None of the people who have ‘liked’, shared or commented the post will win a high performance car. Not one of them. It’s a scam.

How can we be so sure? Well, for one thing the page was created two days ago. It has been set up as a ‘community’ page, so there are no contact details, such as phone number, email or postal address. It has made only one post, the scam post. The grammar is poor; Facebook is written with a lower case ‘f’, it uses the number ‘2’ rather than the word ‘two’ in a sentence and it asks you to ‘Likes this Page‘. There are no terms and conditions on the competition, not even rules on location (such as whether you have to be in the USA, UK or wherever).

In short, it’s an obvious scam.

Now, you may be thinking ‘yeah, it probably is a scam, but where’s the harm in doing it just in case?’ Well, that’s an easy one. If you’re an internet scammer, how useful would it be to have a Facebook Page to promote your scams that already has 100,000, 500,000 or even 1,000,000 people on it – all gullible enough to join the page in the first place? That’s right, you have a captive audience of really gullible people who, very soon, will find posts in their Facebook timelines saying things like “Find out how this teenager earns $2,000 per day from online”, or “The weight-loss trick that’s baffling doctors”, or even “The muscle building pill that is shutting down British gyms”.

All of these obviously spam titles are real, and are ones I have seen in the course of this research. When miracle products such as these are offered to gullible people, they will buy them. That is the danger in liking and sharing these ‘Win a car’ posts on Facebook.

Don’t do it, it’s a scam!

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Darren Jamieson
  • […] Another issue of Facebook’s seemingly arbitrary policies regarding what is and what is not acceptable is the constant stream of scam posts and fake pages cropping up on a daily basis. I, myself, have reported dozens of scam posts over the last 12 months. These aren’t subtle scams now, they’re really obvious ‘you’d have to be seriously stupid to fall for them’ type of posts. The sort of posts only the most gullible of society believe and share on Facebook. You know, posts like these. […]

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