Facebook giveaway scams

Anybody who uses Facebook would have seen pages similar to "we are giving away a car because the last winner didn't call us back". Whilst companies do run giveaways on Facebook, if it's too good to be true, it probably is.

How to spot a fake giveaway

There's a few tell-tale signs, some of which are easy to notice, and others which are more difficult to notice:

• Does the page name match the company's real trading name? For example, "Qantas" is the airline. Pages such as "Qantas Airways", "Qantas Airline" are not real.
• Is there the right number of likes on the page? The supermarket, Woolworths, has over 1.1 million "Likes" on Facebook. A fake giveaway page would likely have much less.
• Is the page a "Verified" page? Facebook and Twitter both use a system of a "blue tick" to indicate that they have confirmed with the owner of the business that this is their real page.
• Is it too good to be true? The adage itself is true, Audi are not likely to give away 8 free Audi R8's because "they made too many" or "they are slightly scratched" or "their last competition winner didn't contact us". For the former examples, they would either recycle, re-manufacture, or rectify the issues. For the latter example, promoters will have a defined process (likely outlined in their terms and conditions) as to what they do if they can't contact the winner of a real competition.

Why do these fake pages exist?

Sometimes the creators of the page are just trying to generate likes. They will then sell the page to another scammer or a business that is trying to get started and feel like they need a lot of likes on their Facebook page from day 1.
Other times, the intent is to get you to complete surveys or click on ads, or do other activities which earn the owner of the page money. 
It might also be that the intent is to get your contact details to try and log into another account or trick you into downloading a virus

What to do if you've been tricked

Change your password for your social media and other websites which might share the same password (and consider using a password manager such as Lastpass so you can easily have different passwords on different websites), run a virus scan and un-like any pages that you don't recognise.

Further reading

To create this article, I used these other web pages, which may interest you as well:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-car-giveaway/
https://blog.iinet.net.au/spot-facebook-survey-scam/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/20/free-audi-r8-cars-facebook-scam