Scam Alert: Fake Samsung Galaxy S4 Giveaway on Facebook

Have you seen your friends liking and sharing a post on Facebook promising to give away a Samsung Galaxy S4? Today we’ll take a closer look at this post and others like it.

It’s a hoax.

Samsung would not set up a separate page to give away their products on Facebook, and if they did, it stands to reason that they would mention it elsewhere online. Let’s take a look at one post with thousands of shares:

We are giving away 5000 Samsung Galaxy S4 to 5000 Lucky Fans for FREE. All that you need to do is complete the easy steps below to participate! (Worldwide)

1. Like => Samsung Galaxy S4
2. Share this photo.
3. Chose your color (white/black/blue/red)

The lucky winners will be selected in 24 hours but will get their gifts at 15 March. Only people that have completed all steps can participate. Winners will be announced at our Facebook fan page or in private message so make sure you like us on Facebook.

Good luck!

This is very similar to the fake Apple giveaways that have been rampant on Facebook over the past couple of months.

Consider

• Bad grammar. This page’s “about” reads: “GIVING Samsung Galaxy S4 on March 14,2013.”
• Recently created. The page was only created about a day before we are writing this article.
• Not Samsung. Samsung’s actual Facebook page does not mention such a giveaway.
• Familiar. The wording and steps are almost identical to the fake Apple giveaways we’ve discussed here.
• Multiple pages. You can find several pages with the same wording and same photo. Why would Samsung create multiple copies of similar pages? They wouldn’t.

What’s the point?

There are several reasons why these fake giveaways keep popping up. In some cases, they link to scam “rewards” programs in which consumers must sign up for all sorts of things they don’t want. In this case, however, it appears that the sole purpose of this fake giveaway is to build likes for a page. People will like and share it “just in case” – knowing that the giveaway is probably fake. Eventually these scammers will change the identity of the page and sell it, along with its thousands of likes, to a business or organization. Below is a screenshot of one incarnation of today’s fake giveaway:

Bottom Line

There are no free Samsung Galaxy S4s to be had. Don’t like or share these pages, as this is only helping liars and scammers.