Fake Facebook Page and How to Avoid Them

I had recently come across a page shared by a friend on Facebook.

According to a post that is currently being shared on Facebook, twenty P&O Cruises tickets were given away by the kind general manager of P&O Cruises.  All you have to do is to share the post.

While there are other legitimate competitions run by Facebook pages, this page had alarm bells ringing. First off, the post look extremely similar to other fake Facebook posts shared around Facebooks.  So I thought I might visit the page to see whether it was legit.  When I click on the post shared I was taken to a Facebook page that looks the Facebook page for P&O Cruises.

Fake P&O Cruise Page

The page had a crappily put together banner as well as a picture of a manager giving away P&O Cruises tickets.  I highly doubt the authenticity of the page so I thought I might hit Google to check what was the real Facebook page for the cruise.

Lo and behold, that wasn't the real Facebook page.  

Real P&O Cruise page

As shown in the screenshot above, the real P&O Page had a blue checkmark verification icon to prove its authenticity.  There was no mention of any giveaways.

Also, according to Hoax Slayer the golden envelopes picture featured in the scam post was apparently stolen from a February 2016 Los Angeles Times report about the making of the Oscars envelopes.

The nail in the coffin is that P&O Cruise Twitter had confirmed that the page indeed was fake.

Hi Thu, many thanks for feeding this back to us. We believe we have been speaking to you about this, but rest assured, we have reported this page and recommend anyone else does the same also. Cease all contact with the page also if you can, we hope this helps! :)

— P&O Cruises (@pandocruises) August 25, 2018

What's alarming is that over 7,900 had reacted to the post and over 16,000 people had shared the post.

So in summary, Facebook pages belonging to large companies have a blue checkmark next to their name.

Closeup of the verification checkmark

Also, if a post looks fishy, try searching on Google to find the real page for that company.  Remember Google is your friend.  If in doubt always Google it (you can also Bing it if you so incline).

PS please share this blog post to your friends so they won't fall for this or similar scams!  You can also donate to me with PayPal and help support an aerospace engineering student!