Facebook Competition Scam

It is a trend for businesses to market through Facebook. One easy way to gain more LIKEs for the Facebook page is to hold a competition. Participants may have to LIKE and share the page and its post or an application in order to qualify. The result can be determined by highest number of LIKEs or simply by "luckydraw". The latter is usually a scam since the management has the right to select the "winner" and needs not even to come up with the prize in the first place.

One recent Facebook scam page is "Camera Enthusiasts".



https://www.facebook.com/pages/Camera-Enthusiasts-20/250936505045771

1. The page does not link to any website that may provide advice as stated.

2. It claims that Canon has given them seven 7D DSLR cameras for nothing, which is far too exaggerating for the price and units. Canon is not a stupid brand that does worthless marketing with seven units of such expensive camera. They would rather get their own marketing team to do the job and increase their own number of fans for their Facebook. Other brands such as Sony and Samsung would give away their cameras free only to selected famous professional photographers.

3. There is no detail about the competition, except that the preys have to keep sharing the posts. The preys are supposed to share as many times as possible in order to have a higher chance to win any unit of camera but there is no application to track it.

4. It posts a status "The comment with no likes wins 40 votes into the 7D draw, drawn tonight!" in order to make everyone LIKE others' posts to generate more views in their friends' newsfeed. This is absolutely lame but smart.



5. After the deadline of the competition, the dumb scammer continues to share the post in the page.

6. The scammer is not able to release the list of winners and claims that it is due to privacy. Any decent business page would have proudly announced the winners and persuade them to advertise the page.

We have yet to find out what are the motives of the scammer. It can be just a prank to see a huge increase in the number of LIKEs or the scammer may be selling some products in future.