If today’s Scam of the day seems familiar, it should to regular Scamicide readers because it is just a slight variation on the Scam of the day for May 24th dealing with the same type of scam. About the only difference was that the May 24th Scam of the day dealt with free Southwest Airlines tickets and this one uses a free Toyota 4Runner SR5 as the hook. More than1.3 million people responded to the Facebook post shown below by commenting “Done” in response to the post which appeared on a phony Toyota Facebook page with 11,000 of those people sharing the post.
The Facebook post, copied below reads “We’ve decided on our 68th anniversary to give a brand new 2021 Toyota4Runner to someone randomly who types (Done) by 4:00 p.m. Monday!”
A good starting point for recognizing that this is a scam is the fact that Toyota began doing business 84 years ago, not 68.
These types of scams entice people to share and like the posting in order to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithms that value the popularity of postings measured by likes and shares which then appear on the Facebook pages of more people. Scammers are able to change the content of what is shared or liked to something entirely different through a technique called “farming.” This is often done in order to send advertising or gather marketing information, but it also can be done to send malware infected content that can steal personal information from your computer and use it to make you a victim of identity theft.
When you see one of these “too good to be true” offers, the best course of action is to check with the company’s legitimate website where you will learn whether or not the offer is indeed legitimate.
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