Anyone out there who likes chocolate? Thought so. Anyone out there out who would like to win a hamper stuffed full of slabs of Dairy Milk, piles of Chocolate Buttons and handfuls of Curly Wurlys? Yes, thought so too, but if you do, don’t enter a prize draw on the Cadbury Reward Facebook page, because it’s not a genuine promotion.
In fact, I did a search on Facebook for ‘Cadbury Reward’ which pulled up 15 pages, all with the distinctive gold on purple Cadbury’s logo as the profile pic. I checked a couple at random and both had a blurry photo of Cadbury products as the banner. Both also featured photos of a young woman standing beside an oversized bar of chocolate and smiling, as well as very similar posts.
Beware of temptation
By way of an example, here’s a post from 6 December: “Hello Everyone, my name is Becky White and I’m one of the managers at Cadbury UK! I have some good news for you all – To celebrate 126 years of Cadbury, EVERYONE who shaᴦes and comments in the next 8hrs will get one of these Cadbury Hampers delivered to their door on Tuesday December 8th. Limit 1 per person. Enjoy your free chocolate.”
To take delivery of their hamper, entrants are directed to click on a link. I haven’t clicked on it myself, but I’d stake two Twirls and a Wispa that it takes you to a site where you’re asked to fill out personal information and your financial details. Don’t do this, because the promotion is not being run by the official Cadbury Facebook page and if you do you risk the loss of your identity and the contents of your bank account.
Here’s another example, which was posted just a few hours ago, although I’ve deleted the actual link, because I don’t want anyone to inadvertently click on it: ‘ CONGRATULATIONS For those of you who receive comments or official messages from me and who are selected as winners of the competition you are participating in Step 1 = Like and Share/ Step 2 = Please register now here https://xxxxx.xxxxx.xxxxx to receive my gift. And the Gift will be sent after you have successfully registered (this is real and official) God bless you/ Note : This official program is sponsored by various commecials and movies’
Spot the spelling mistake
There are a number of giveaways that this is a scam, but you’ll notice that both of these posts, particularly the second one, are riddled with poor grammar and spelling mistakes. I’ve written before about why scammers can’t spell and they do it deliberately.
The scammers work on the basis that if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t notice a spelling error, you might be the kind of person who won’t notice that they’re being scammed. Yes, it’s calculating and insulting, because whoever we are, we can all be susceptible to falling for a scam and no one is totally immune to their often very sophisticated tactics.
Fortunately, the pages I looked at only had a few likes and shares, so my guess is that a lot of people recognise them for what they are – scams. However, even if one person is taken in by these fake promotions, then that’s one person too many, so I urge you to be vigilant, make sure you raise awareness of this kind of scam in your community and if you encounter similar scams please report them to Action Fraud, the national fraud and cybercrime centre.
Sarah Burns is Prizeology’s Chief Prizeologist and a National Trading Standards Scams Team Scambassador.
