Please, please stop doing this

I’m sure many of you have read my rants against the type of Facebook post I’m about to show you. But since they’re still going around and still putting a lot of people’s phones, tablets, and computers at risk, I’ll bring it up again. The post shown below appeared in my Facebook feed several times during the past few days.

Just by looking at this coupon, you should know IMMEDIATELY that it’s a fake. How in the world could a major grocery chain afford to give everyone with a Facebook page $250 off their groceries? It just could not happen. Now, if you click on this, you’ll see what appears to be a super-simple survey to answer to claim your prize.

You’ll also see some questionable testimonials from people who claim to have collected the reward. If you actually bother to read them, it’s pretty clear they were not written by someone who uses English as a first language. Nobody talks the way these comments are written.

Here’s the rub. This link takes you pages that laden with malware that can infect your phone, tablet, or computer. When you think you’re clicking answers to surveys, you’re likely giving permission for malicious apps to download and install. What’s even worse is that it then asks you to share the post.

Doing this exposes all of your Facebook friends to the same malware that’s likely stealing your banking information, reading all of your contacts, and logging all of your passwords. It’s as if you gave a gang of criminals the home addresses and phone numbers of all of your friends. I know a lot of you will share it and say, “It can’t hurt” or “Just in case it’s true.”  Well, it does hurt. It can hurt you, it can crash your friends’ devices, and it could result in you or your friends losing thousands of dollars from their bank accounts.

There’s no excuse for falling for this. Even without a warning, this is so outlandish that the warning bells should be ding, ding, dinging. Don’t play this game “just in case” and don’t share these posts. Also, if you see others sharing them, make sure you let them know the truth about these scams.