Watch out for Center Parcs “Holiday for 4” scam spreading on Facebook
A Facebook post is spreading across the social networking site claiming to offer free holidays for 4 people at Center Parcs.
The post claims to come from Mark Sutton, which the post claims in the CEO of Center Parcs. The post also urges readers to click the Sign Up button on the page to claim their prize, as well as like, share and comment on the post and follow the page.
An example of the post can be seen below.
!!IMPORTANT NEWS!! I’m Mark Sutton a CEO at Center Pacrs, I’m at our headquarters with 20 boxes all containing a Center Parcs holiday for 4!
Want one? I’ll be picking 20 random people at 9pm tonight so if you’ve shared, commented on this photo and liked our page you can get one FREE!
Our regular readers would soon be able to correctly identify this as a typical Facebook like-farming scam. The post is completely fake, and there are no Center Parcs prizes on offer here. In reality this is a scam to lure users to spammy marketing websites.
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There are a number of red flags here as there are with many of these types of scams.
– The image has been clearly digitally altered. On inspection, you can see the Center Parcs logo has been added to the boxes and in the background, and the actual wording on the boxes has been scrubbed off.
– Mark Sutton isn’t the CEO of Center Parcs. The CEO is Martin Dalby.
– The Facebook page isn’t the official blue ticked Facebook page belonging to Center Parcs. Facebook users should never enter competitions or promotions from pages that don’t belong to the official pages of the companies being represented.
– No company offers expensive prizes just for liking and sharing a Facebook post.
– Users are directed to spammy marketing webpages when they click the Sign Up button on the Facebook page. Such pages don’t belong to Center Parcs (just like the Facebook page) and are promoting different offers. They are designed to harvest your personal information so the scammers can spam you.
Once again, despite our numerous warnings, Facebook users are sharing such obvious scams in their tens of thousands. Please avoid interacting with such posts. You expose yourself to scammers and since you’re sharing the posts to your timeline, you’re exposing your friends as well.
For more information on fake competition posts on Facebook, click here.
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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.)
Become a Facebook Supporter. For 0.99p (~$1.30) a month you can become a Facebook fan, meaning you get an optional Supporter Badge when you comment on our Facebook posts, as well as discounts on our merchandise. You can subscribe here (cancel anytime.)
