At last count, there are over 100 thousand people hoping to win a luxury car from an anonymous and overnight Facebook page.
You got to say it is a very successful promotion targeted at a special market of people who ask or suspect nothing.
Why is there no website or link or T&C? That’s the first red flag.
You can say it cost you nothing. It also cost nothing to set up a Facebook page to do mining.
The scam usually goes like this and was busted by Snopes as early as December 2014:
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“For the FIRST time in facebook history we are giving away 2 [insert Audi, Mercedes, Range Rover, etc] to two winners that we will select on [insert date] completely at random.
Would you like to join this amazing giveaway for a chance to own a brand new AUDI? Simply follow the steps below to enter the competition :
Step 1) Likes this Page
Step 2) Like this Post
Step 3) Comment which color you want. (BLACK OR WHITE)
Step 4) Share on your wall
The winners will be messaged via inbox message”
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The current “Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG 2015 Giveaway” is a “Like(s) Farming” scam at best. A page with many likes can be recycled to scam even more people later as the accumulated likes gives it some seeming credibility.
At worst, it is mining of personal data from stupid people. The gullible people opt in for permission spamming by liking the page. The perpetrators gained a list of idiots to spam via PM or to con in future.
For the spammers and scammers, it is a free and easy way of building a database of greedy people most likely to fall for a scam. What could be better? Brilliant, indeed.
Further (simple) investigation, revealed it is an old scam on Twitter and Facebook.
It works especially well here because Malaysians are suckers for anything free.