Watch out for Facebook posts offering free stone ovens…
A Facebook post claiming to giveaway 3 stones ovens for liking a page is spreading across the social media network.
The post – which was posted by a Facebook page called StyleHome – claims that in order to stand a chance of winning, readers must like the StyleHome page, comment YES and share the post to their own timelines.
However, as our regular readers would no doubt know, the page and post (below) have many of the hallmarks of a typical like-farming Facebook scam.
TO CELEBRATE LAUNCH OF OUR FB PAGE !
WE ARE GIVING AWAY THIS AMAZING STOVE OVEN TO 3 LUCKY FANS. TO ENTER JUST HIT SHARE, LIKE our page AND COMMENT ‘YES’
<3 WINNERS MUST HAVE LIKED OUR PAGE <3
For those who are uninitiated concerning how to spot like-farming scams, here we briefly outline what they are (and why you shouldn’t participate “just in case”) as well as some red flags displayed by this particular example.
Like-farming pages are pages that attempt to garner as many likes as possible through exploitation and deception. In this case, a fake competition or giveaway. (More about them here.)
Participating in them, even if it’s just in case, is certainly not recommended. This is because these pages can be used to launch any number of more serious scams and the more followers they have the more reach they will get. Additionally the post you shared to “enter” the fake competition can be later edited to include links to malicious or spammy websites. This puts your friends at risk who may see the link you’ve shared on their newsfeeds.
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Finally how to tell this is a like-farming post as opposed to a legitimate Facebook giveaway –
– Firstly the post requests user share the post onto their own timelines, which is against Facebook’s terms of service concerning promotions.
– Additionally, the people who operate the page are unknown. The page clearly doesn’t represent any company named StyleHome since it lacks any contact information, website, branding or any other details that could lead someone to the specific people who operate the Facebook page. It lacks any verificiation tick indicating it officially represents a brand.
– Finally the page lacks any history. It is a brand new Facebook page only created days prior to it posting these giveaway messages requesting people like their page.
Don’t fall for like-farming posts. Once you know how, it is easy to determine between legitimate promotions and like-farming scams.
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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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