Can you win £50 Costa voucher for sharing Facebook post? Fact Check
A Facebook page claiming to be from Costa Coffee UK purports that users who share and comment on a post will receive a £50 voucher to celebrate the coffee brand’s 50th anniversary.
FALSE
The post can be seen below.
As you’re all aware we are closed Due to Lockdown But its our 50th Anniversary and we are giving EVERYONE who shares and comments FREE £50 Voucher to celebrate our 50th Birthday! We Will Inbox Your Voucher Within The Next 12 hours! Offer Valid For UK & Ireland Only
It’s a typical Facebook fake competition like-farming scam with a coronavirus twist, since the message references the lockdown in the UK.
Such posts are designed to trick Facebook users into engaging with a post by falsely offering a prize that doesn’t exist. In this case, that prize is a £50 Costa voucher. The post – using a network of fake Facebook accounts – has managed to attract tens of thousands of shares in only a handful of hours.
Such fake posts make Facebook users vulnerable to more serious scams. For example, often the scammers behind the fake page and fake post will later claim that in order to win, Facebook users need to visit an external website to “verify” their entry. However, such sites are typically data harvesting websites designed to collect personal information on visitors in order to spam them.
Alternatively the page owners could subsequently message those who engage with the post while pretending to be Costa Coffee in order to try and extract personal information from them to commit identity fraud, or even try and trick a Facebook user into sending money or compromising their security.
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How to spot these scams…
The page isn’t the official Costa Facebook page, which will have a blue verification tick. The page that made this post lacks that tick, and shouldn’t be trusted.
The page is new. In fact Facebook’s Page Transparency tool shows the page is only hours old.
The page asks you to share the post. Big brands tend not to ask users to share a post in order to enter a competition since such a requirement is against Facebook’s terms of service.
Costa isn’t celebrating their 50th anniversary. The 50th anniversary isn’t until 2021.
Always avoid engaging with Facebook posts that offer prizes for sharing the post from unverified Facebook pages. For more information on fake Facebook competitions, click here.
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