Coca Cola 24 Pack Giveaway Facebook Scam
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The claim
Coca Cola is giving away one 24 pack of Coke to celebrate its birthday!
Get yours while supplies last!
What the fact-checkers found
According to a post that is currently being shared on Facebook, Coca Cola is giving EVERYONE who participates a free 24 pack of Coke. The post claims that coke is offering the freebie as a means of celebrating its birthday and urges you to click to get yours now while supplies last.
However, the post is yet another Facebook survey scam. No Coke packs are being given away and the post is not associated with Coca Cola in any way. As per usual with such scams, the post is designed to trick you into spamming your Facebook friends and divulging your personal information via suspect survey websites.
If you click on the fraudulent post, you will be taken to an equally fraudulent webpage that is made to look like it is part of Facebook. You will then be asked to share the fake page on Facebook and then send a page link to five Facebook Groups you belong to. Via these ‘2 simple steps’, you effectively become marketers for the scammers and expose your Facebook friends and fellow group members to their bogus giveaway.
And, even after completing the outlined steps, you will still not get to claim the promised Coke pack. Instead, a popup window will appear that claims that before getting your giveaway, you must first complete a survey to ‘verify’ your entry. The popup will include a list of links that open various survey websites.
The survey sites will offer the chance to win further prizes in exchange for filling in surveys and supplying your name, phone numbers, home address and email address. If you do participate, the information you provide will be shared with third party marketing companies. Fine print on the page will explain that, by participating, you are in fact giving permission for these companies to contact you. Thus, you will soon begin receiving sales pitches for various products and services via email, surface mail, phone, and SMS.
And, no matter how many surveys you complete, you will never get to claim your Coke. Neither will anybody else who participates.
So, you might ask, why do scammers create these fake giveaways? Well, each and every time that somebody supplies their information via one of the survey sites, the scammers will earn a commission. Thus, the more giveaway scams that they can create and the more they can promote them on Facebook, the more money they will make.
Don’t be fooled by these scams. Do not participate in any supposed competition in which you are told you must share and like the promotional material and participate in surveys before being able to claim a prize.
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