It’s almost too good to be true, isn’t it? A holiday of a lifetime, all for free. No wonder people were so excited when they read this blurb:
‘As we are about to celebrate our 1st Birthday we have decided to bring some joy by giving out a 10 night trip for 2 to Bora Bora including flights and over water bungalow to someone who types @ then clicks highlight by March 22nd at 6pm. You will have 2 years to use the trip.’
Just type ‘highlight’ and you could be the winner. On the Facebook page alone, 1.1 million people have joined in the fun and it’s been shared 16,000 times. The trouble is, there’s no holiday, there’s no such company as Bora Bora Holidays. It’s a scam and it’s a scam called ‘Like farming’.
Here’s a link to what like farming actually is, but for those of you who can’t be bothered to click on links, I’ll quote from the first paragraph:
‘Like-farming, aka like-harvesting, is a method used by commercial parties and scammers alike to raise the popularity of a site or domain. The ultimate dream of every like-farmer is for his post to go viral by accumulating as many likes and shares as possible from all over the world.
Like-farmers rely on near-instinctual reactions from users by exploiting hot-button topics such as child rearing or animal welfare in their posts. From commercial parties such as web stores, you can expect giveaways and lotteries.
The difference between legitimate like-farmers and scammers? Scammers will often transform those popular posts into completely different sites that trick users into giving away their personal information, forking over money or credit card details, or clearing out their crypto wallets.
Like-farming is performed mostly on Facebook, but it often expands to other social media platforms, such as Instagram and Twitter.’
In other words, when you enter what is in truth a non-existent competition, you are opening yourself up to being scammed. If you share the post with your friends, you run the risk of them being scammed, too.
Ah, but I hear you say. No one would be so stupid as to give away personal information in order to collect their ‘prize’. We’re smarter than that. To which I reply, well, you were daft enough to fall for this con trick in the first place so if you are daft enough to do that, you’re daft enough to take this a step further, with potentially disastrous results.
My guess is that we fall for these something for nothing competitions because we’re a bit greedy. Who wouldn’t want to win a once in a lifetime holiday? Or an RV? Or anything else that in the normal run of events we couldn’t afford. We lift our guard because we fancy a free lunch even though there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
I won’t name names but people I know have added their names to the scam, people who I thought would know better. If something is on the internet in general and Facebook in particular, then it must be true.
A cursory check of any number of websites, like snopes, will prove the validity of such ‘offers’ but still people fall for them. It’s no different from the man from the gas board coming to read your meter and then stealing your life savings. Will we ever learn?
