Fraudulent link is shared as ‘Amazon’ website offering gifts for Christmas - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
January 3, 2022
A post sharing a link of a purported ‘Amazon’ website is being widely circulating on social media claiming that the ‘Amazon’ e-commerce website is offering 15,000 free products as part of the Christmas celebrations. This purported online website of ‘Amazon’ leads to a survey page, asking people to fill out a quiz and share the link with their WhatsApp friends. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: A purported online website of ‘Amazon’ offering 15,000 free products on Christmas.
Fact: The website link shared in the post is a fraudulent one. The ‘Amazon’ e-commerce website did not offer any such gifts on Christmas. The same ‘rediroff.ru’ fraudulent website was luring people in the name of New Year and Sankranti festivals gifts. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
On searching the ‘rediroff.ru’ website shared in the post, we found out the purported website shared in the post is presently not active. When we searched to check whether the ‘Amazon’ e-commerce website had offered any such free gifts on Christmas, we could not find any such announcements on the ‘Amazon’ website or on their official Twitter handle.
On searching for more details related to the ‘rediroff.ru’ website shared in the post, we found a news article reporting the details of this purported ‘Amazon’ website offering gifts on the occasion of Christmas. This article reported it as a fraudulent website, luring customers in the name of Amazon Christmas gifts. Other news articles reporting fraudulent ‘Amazon’ gift offering websites can be seen here and here. A few media reports informed that the same ‘rediroff.ru’ website was now luring people in the name of free gifts on New Year and Sankranti festivals.
‘Amazon’ created a separate webpage for creating awareness over these common gift card scams that are done through social media, e-mails, phone calls, and fake survey websites. ‘Amazon’ alarmed people of these dubious websites conducting fake surveys to obtain customer information for the purposes of identity theft.
Earlier, FACTLY debunked similar claims about contests offering gifts from D-Mart, Rolex, and Flipkart websites. Those articles can be seen here, here, and here.
To sum it up, this purported ‘Amazon’ website offering gifts on Christmas is a fraudulent one.