Multiple fraudulent offers are being shared as giveaways ahead of Christmas - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
November 15, 2022
Factly noticed a few social media scams related to famous retail chains giving away free gifts to users as Christmas season giveaways. One such post is being shared widely on Facebook, which claims that any user who types ‘Morrisons’ under the post and shares it will be gifted three Cadbury selection boxes. Let’s fact-check the claim made in this post.
Claim: Morrisons is gifting three Cadbury selection boxes to anyone who types ‘Morrisons’ under the post and shares it.
Fact: Morrisons has not officially announced such a scheme through their social media handles or website. A few years ago, when claims similar to this went viral, Morrisons alerted its customers not to fall for social media posts which claim to gift a free voucher if they like, share and comment ‘Thanks, Morrisons.’ Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
To check for the claim’s veracity, we performed a reverse image search on the post’s image, which did not lead us to any relevant information. We noticed ‘Morrisons Warrington’ written on the welcome board of the supermarket and searched if Diana Reid was the manager there, as the post claims. This did not lead us to any credible evidence to conclude.
Then, we went through Morrisons’ verified social media profiles (here, here and here) and official website to check if they have made official announcements about gifting social media users Cadbury selection boxes. But we did not find any such announcements there.
On further search, we found that Morrisons has alerted their customers not to fall prey to scams that promise to give exciting gifts on liking, sharing and commenting on social media posts. News reports about this can be read here and here. Official scam alerts issued by Morrisons can be seen here and here.
Facebook alerts its users to always look for ‘ Unverified Pages claiming to represent a large organisation or public figure.’ The viral post was made by a Facebook page named Morrisons Club, Fans which is unverified and its first post was made on 13th November 2022. From all of this, we can conclude that this is a scam post.
Similar fraudulent Christmas offers were debunked by Factly earlier:
1. This purported ‘M&S’ promotional message offering golden ticket giveaways as part of Christmas celebrations is fake
2. Fraudulent link is shared as ‘Amazon’ website offering gifts for Christmas
3. This purported ‘Ramraj Cotton’ website conducting a competition for gifting 20,000 rupees is fraudulent
To sum it up, multiple fraudulent offers are being shared as giveaways ahead of Christmas celebrations