Can you win a Toyota 4Runner for sharing a Facebook post? Fact Check
Facebook posts claim you can win a Toyota 4Runner TRD Pro for sharing the post and visiting a website to “validate your entry”.
FALSE
One such post can be seen below –
Well unfortunately our 4th of July winner (Chosen at random via shares) was under the legal driving age so we are giving you all one last chance to win the beautiful new Toyota 4Runner in any color by sharing before 3pm Thursday. After Visit http://www.toyota4x4cars.com to Validate Your Entry!
Despite the claims made in the post, it’s a like-farming scam designed to trick users into sharing the post across Facebook as well as luring visitors to a spammy marketing website that collects contact information in order to send out spam.
This is just another fake giveaway competition that uses Facebook like-farming to spread. At the time of writing the post has been shared over 150,000 times.
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The red flags that are typically present with these scams are all present in this case as well, including…
– The post being made by a page only a few weeks old (which can be seen using the Page Transparency feature.)
– The post was made from a page that is not verified, highlighting the fact that it is not an official page belonging to Toyota.
– The post requests users share it on their timeline, which is against Facebook’s terms of service regarding promotions (the page admins cannot determine if an entrant has shared a post if the entrant has their privacy settings set to friends only.)
– The post links to an external website that has nothing to do with Toyota which subsequently forwards visitors to third party marketing websites that request visitors to complete surveys (resulting in them being spammed after completion.)
– The post falsely claims the prize was unclaimed or had to be raffled out again. In this case because the “winner was under the legal driving age”. This is to try and trick readers into thinking the competition is legitimate.
Of course none of this has anything to do with the official Toyota brand, who operate their own official verified social media pages and website.
As always, avoid sharing these posts to your friends or visiting the spammy websites they direct you to. It’s just a scam to trick you into visiting spammy websites and handing them your contact details so they can spam you or sell your contact details to other marketing websites to spam you.
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