Facebook scams and like farming through fake giveaways happen everyday by opportunistic scammers. A very high percentage of people are tricked and scammed on the Internet, its easy to drop your guard and fall for something. These people prey on venerable and sometimes desperate people, offering them a lifeline, or so you think. You just need to make sure to learn from your mistakes and that you educate yourself on what’s out there.
Big prizes
If the prizes are really big, like a car, high value shopping vouchers or tons of Apple products, its very likely fake and there is no prize. A good example is a Facebook page with a photo of a stack of iPhones or iPads and a giveaway for them all. The graphics will likely be stolen from from Google Images and there will be no prizes and no winners.
How can you find out if a page is legit?
A grey tick next to the company name shows it is a verified account for that business and a blue ticked shows it is a verified account of a public figure, media company or brand.
An easy way to find out if accounts are fake is to simply look through past posts, 99% of the time they will have been set up within the month and have no past history.
Now that’s not to say that all competitions are a scam, a lot of companies do legitimate online competitions for good prizes, you just have to do a quick check its real before not only giving up your data but sharing the ‘competition’ with friends and family.
How do fake Facebook groups make money?
Facebook groups and pages with any kind of audience are worth money, the more followers the more they are worth. They sell the groups and pages on to other scammers, you have essentially signed up to a group of gullible people and that is a very dangerous in the wrong hands.
Prevent like farming
Thanks for reading, be sure to not only learn for your own mistakes but to educate others, so they don’t do the same. There are no real regulations around this type of stuff, so we need to look out for each other to stay safe.
