I’ve warned you before about ‘like farming’ scams. The majority of which involve requesting that you like and share a post. Coupons, gift certificates, and vouchers from major retailers are a common lure as well as large prizes like vehicles and RVs.
Another favorite is to use the face and name of a celebrity and say they are giving away prizes.
One thing that all of these scams have in common is they ask you to like a post or page, comment, and share the post. Liking and commenting on posts of friends and legitimate pages, will raise their profile and I’m all for that. But liking and commenting on these scam sites means that they are more likely to turn up in your friends’ feeds.
You might say, what’s the harm? The harm is that many of these fake contests also involve clicking on links that can take you straight to malware. It means these scammers might contact you or your friends who fell for the scam and either invite you to click on a link or attempt to trick you into paying some type of fee to get your prize.
Another thing like farmers do is get a whole bunch of likes for their phony contest, then get rid of that content and totally change the name of the page. A recent example involved a page called Christians Against the Little Mermaid. This group was supposedly made up of people enraged that an African-American actress had been cast in the live-action version of the Disney movie and had over 30,000 members. The existence of the group made headlines all over the world. Except, the vast majority of the folks who signed up for that group had signed up for a group called Love, Compassion, & Understanding that was founded in 2017. The name of the group had been switched to Boycott the Superbowl, then to Muhammad Ali Memorial, and then to Christians Against the Little Mermaid. The people behind the group could have changed the name to anything and represented you as a member as being for or against any cause they choose.
Every single time you like, comment on, or share a post that you haven’t checked out closely, you’re raising the profile of crooks.
Think about it. Be part of the solution and not part of the problem.
The information you presented here is great background info on the bait-and-switch technique. It seems the bait-and-switch technique will follow us through time.