No, you won’t win a coupon for [insert brand name]’s anniversary

ByCraig Haley

Is [insert store here] really giving away a free [insert amount here] coupon for their [insert number here] anniversary.

This is the latest like-farming, fake competition template doing the social media rounds, luring social media users into either following like-farming pages or directing them to spammy marketing webpages. Or both.

The variations are endless.

For example, no Morrisons are not giving away a £75 voucher for their 80th anniversary. JD Wetherspoon are not giving away £150 coupons for their 37th anniversary. The same applies for Waitrose giving away £75 vouchers for their 112th anniversary. No, you won’t win a $275 Aldi coupon on their anniversary either.

Fancy a holiday? You won’t get free South West Airline tickets for their 90th anniversary . You won’t win a holiday of a lifetime to celebrate EasyJet’s 20th anniversary either. Sorry.

We won’t go on, but there are countless other variants spreading the interwebs as well.

It’s spam. The aim of most of the scams is to lure social media users into visiting spammy marketing webpages that have the sole aim of trying to extract as much information from a visitor as possible, so they can target them with more spam offers, as well as collate all your personal details for any number of nefarious purposes.

Alternatively you could be told to share a post and follow a Facebook page to “enter” a competition, and targeted with spammy links at a later date.


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Can I not just participate just in case?

For those like us that attempt to help minimise this type of spam, “just in case” is fingernails on a chalk board.

Firstly, if you go the whole way and part with your personal information to marketing webpages, the “why not, just in case” question will soon be answered, when you start getting copious amounts of spam via your email, postal address and even phone.

But what if it just involves sharing a Facebook post and liking a Facebook page? What’s the harm? Well spam can reach you through social media too, and following like-farming Facebook pages is not without its drawbacks, unless you enjoy getting spammy links or even scams hitting your newsfeed.

And why not just share a Facebook post? Because doing so means that you’re forcing this same issue upon your Facebook friends as well. You’re putting them at risk.

Spam is like a bad virus. It does everything it can to spread, using people as conduits. Whether it’s sharing a link, posting a link or liking a Facebook page, the spammers are trying to get their virus to spread, via you.

And the only people who benefit are those spammers. The collateral damage is you, and your friends, who have to deal with the fallout spam that the spammers leave in their wake.

Spotting the fakes

It’s pretty simple. Whether its Range Rover, Asda, Tesco or Aldi. These companies only run promotions via their official social media channels whether that be on Facebook or Twitter or whatever other social media platform.

The official social media channels are typically marked as such. For example on both Facebook and Twitter a tick verifies the page as an officially linked page. Like-farming pages lack this tick.

And of course it’s also worth noting that you’re not going to win something substantial just by sharing a post onto your Facebook timeline. Requesting users do such a thing is against Facebook’s terms of service regarding promotions.

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Thanks for reading! But before you go… as part of our latest series of articles on how to earn a little extra cash using the Internet (without getting scammed) we have been looking into how you can earn gift vouchers (like Amazon vouchers) using reward-per-action websites such as SwagBucks. If you are interested we even have our own sign-up code to get you started. Want to learn more? We discuss it here. (Or you can just sign-up here and use code Nonsense70SB when registering.)

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