It’s on the internet, it must be true

You have to admit, that’s an amazing prize. A ‘Rattan Furniture Set’ (I have never heard of one of these, but that’s just me being ignorant) looks the absolute business. It appears to be too good to be true. That’s because it is. Literally.

There’s no prize because Garden Giveaways does not exist. How could they? If their sole purpose was to give away free garden furniture, it’s safe to assume they wouldn’t last very long. And not only can you not get free furniture for nothing, you can’t buy it either. Garden Giveaways is a scam called Like Farming. From the pages of hoax-slayer.net, this is what happens:

‘The scammers first create a new Facebook Page geared to a certain product or service such as smartphones, gaming consoles, beauty products, or theme parks. The Page may state or imply that it is an official Page endorsed by a company such as Samsung, Apple, Sony or Disneyland and include stolen graphics that depict the targeted company’s products.

The Page then begins posting messages claiming that it will be giving away free products to selected users:

But, nobody actually wins anything. Ever. The prizes do not even exist. The promised prizes are just the bait used to entice users into liking the page and sharing the promotional posts. By getting people to click the like button as well as spam out the bogus promotions by sharing them with their friends, these fake Pages can accumulate many thousands of likes, often within just a few hours.’

 

And what do scammers gain from Like Farming pages?

 

‘When they have accumulated a large number of likes – perhaps 100,000 or more – the scammers can then sell the Page to unscrupulous marketers. These marketers can then re-purpose the Page to suit their needs and use its large “like” base to blast out spam messages promoting their products or services.

Selling Facebook Pages is clearly against Facebook’s Terms of Service. Nevertheless, there is a thriving underground market for established Facebook Pages and the more likes the Page has the more that it can potentially be sold for. There are even marketplace websites and forums set up specifically to buy and sell Facebook Pages.’

 

So, essentially, by sharing Like Farming posts, all you do is to encourage scammers to make money and to keep scamming you with fake offers.

If something appears to be too good to be true, that usually means it is. And scams like ‘Garden Giveaways’ fall right into that category.

The internet is a wonderful thing, but you do need to keep your wits about you to make sure you aren’t taken in by scammers. 2.6k people have already been fooled by this fake ad by sharing it with their unwitting friends. These scammers figure that if you can be taken in by this simple scam, you can be taken in by anything. After all, if it’s on the internet, it must be true, right?