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