Fraudulent Woolworths, Coles, and Harvey Norman gift vouchers are propagating on Facebook, which retailers believe to be a scheme to collect personal information.
Vouchers worth $400 or $500 have quickly circulated due to seemingly endorsements from Facebook friends. Plus the fact that retailers usually do run on their official pages real gift voucher competitions.
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“Please be aware there are some possible email, survey, website and Facebook scams currently circulating using the Woolworths name and logo,” says a Woolworths spokesperson.
“These ‘phishing’ scams illegally imitate well-known brands to try to collect customers’ personal information.”
The fraudulent competition lead Facebook users to a Website like Woolworthsfree.net or harveynorman.org, allegedly offering free gift vouchers in exchange of following three “simple steps”.
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A counter appears on the site to supposedly show that the vouchers are quickly running out in real time, along with “thank you” comments from seemingly genuine Facebook users, and a portion asserting that more than 6 million people have liked the page so far.
Software architect Troy Hunt, who exposes online scams on his blog, wrote that the “sense of urgency”, apparent popularity, and air of authenticity attracts unsuspecting victims.
He added that he had analysed the code line by line and all of this was a hoax.
Hunt believes the scammer was located in Albania, which means it would be difficult for authorities to tackle the grifter.
“People in Australia being scammed by a guy in Albania using a server hosted in Germany. Who do the cops speak to,” Hunt wrote. “My experience talking with the authorities about the call centre scammers shows that things like this just get filed away in the ‘too hard’ basket.”
Since victims are asked to share the scam with friends to claim the “prize”, such naturally allowed it to rapidly spread online.
Woolworths, for its part, first alerted customers about the bogus vouchers months ago, but has recently added another warning on its Facebook page as customers continue to be deceived and end up blaming the retailer.
Woolworths states they would never ask customers for personal or banking details in unsolicited communications. The retailer stresses that all of its official competitions are run from its own Facebook page and are also posted on the promotions and competitions page of woolworths.com.au.
Coles issues a warning on its Facebook page, as well, informing customers of the hoax.
Have you encountered any of these online scams? Did you find out later that they were fake? What did you do about them?
Images: Brisbane Times and Troy Hunt
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
