Mercedes Benz & Range Rover Facebook “giveaways” debunked

Despite what you may have heard on Facebook, you won’t get either a Mercedes Benz or a Range Rover just for sharing and liking a Facebook post.

Fake Facebook competition and giveaway scams are rife when the festive season is upon us, and despite being a relatively seasoned ruse, these scams never seem to fade away.

Scammers are always looking for people to both share their posts and Like their Facebook pages and they’re willing to set up fake competitions in order to do it.

And two particularly successful scams over the last 24 hours [from the time of writing] have promised to offer both the Mercedes Benz E63 AMG and a Range Rover 4WD for the lucky winners who will be “selected at random” in December 2014. Both pages claim the offer is happening “for the first time in Facebook history”.

Previous scams have targeted victims with the latest model of BMW.

mercedes-hoax2

An example of the fake post.

Of course there is no giveaway. These scams exist to accumulate fans for a Facebook page which can then be used to kick-start further more nefarious scams. They are also used to lure readers to external websites that trick victims into completing spammy surveys which also make money for the scammers, and cause the victim to be the victim of copious amounts of spam! (Read more about survey scams here)

Liking and Sharing these posts help them spread across Facebook and doing so puts your friends at risk as well.

We have an article here outlining how fake Facebook giveaways and competitions work so it’s definitely worth a read, and if you have a friend who is constantly falling for these scams send them the link to help them out!

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