A scam that appears to have sucked in thousands of people is doing the rounds on Facebook.
A Facebook page claiming to be run by travel company Thomas Cook is running a fake competition, which has gained plenty of interest online.
“Hello everybody, I’m Sarah Lindle and at 6pm ill [sic] be giving this away to someone who shares this post. What will you get? A Majorca holiday for 4. Want to double your chances? Then leave a comment,” reads one of the scam page’s updates.
It isn’t clear how long the update has been online for, but a screengrab posted online by the Gloucester Safer Cyber Twitter account suggests it attracted more than 25,000 Likes, 35,000 comments and 133,000 shares.
A separate post by the page, a screengrab of which was posted online by a Twitter user called Jan Syk, said: “Morning everyone, some of you may of [sic] seen the giveaway we did yesterday. It was for a holiday in Majorca for 4 people.
“Luckily for you the person we choose [sic] has sadly now disabled their account so we couldn’t contact them. So In 2hrs [sic] we’ll be giving it away again. :- SHARE-COMMENT-LIKE PAGE -:”. That post had more than 10,000 Likes at the time it was screengrabbed.
Thomas Cook says it has reported the page. It isn’t clear if it has been taken down, but we struggled to track it down this afternoon.
The fake Thomas Cook page appears to have been rather successful, despite the telltale signs of it being illegitimate being pretty clear to see. Aside from the grammatical errors in its posts, it uses an outdated version of the Thomas Cook logo and, crucially, doesn’t have a blue verified badge.
What’s the best online scam you’ve come across? Let us know @TrustedReviews.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
