If you spend most of your day on the internet, you are likely to come across different scams, some very clever that you may fall for and others outright lame that you see directly through them the first instance.
With that said, some people still don’t seem to differentiate between genuine competition and scams on the internet. I noticed this today when I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and came across a post shared by a friend of mine. Below is a screenshot of the shared post.
iPhone scam
As you can see from the post above, the admin of the page was willing to give away 100 iPhones to ‘lucky winners’. All people had to do is like that particular post, comment the color they want and share that particular post on their walls.
This may seem like a genuine campaign, but if you ask yourself, why would they be giving away 100 iPhones to random people? And the winners were to be alerted through their inboxes. This means that they we not obliged to share publicly who won the iPhones. That should be the first red flag if you wanted to participate in such a competition. If someone is running a competition, winners have to be announced publicly.
Second thing, iPhones are very expensive and why should someone just give away 100 of them without any clear guidelines or term and conditions. Before you take part in any competition online, make sure the rewards you get in the end make sense. No one will give away 100 iPhones without any clear reason. The person or company needs to have some way he/she is benefiting from this. If it a business, there should be a clear way they are benefiting from this.
The End Game
People who run scams like these may want to make money in the end. For starters, they might ask the supposed winners for their addresses so they can use to ship the iPhones. From here they may ask the winners to pay for the shipping costs. Keep in mind there is no iPhone being offered so when you send them money, they will disappear completely.
Looking at the post, you can see it has been shared over 8,000 times. Imagine that the admin contacts just about 1,000 of them telling them they have won and they need to send $10 for shipping. Getting $10 from people who already believe in you is not that hard. Most will be willing to do so and if you do the calculations, this translates to $10,000. He/she gets his money and disappears.
Apart from the above mention way, the scammers might be doing what is called ‘like-harvesting’. This is where they make the page extremely popular and then sell it off to some other scammer for a profit. The new owner will then use it to sell anything he wishes.
So in short, be careful and do not fall for these scams when online.
