No, Land Rover is not giving away a Range Rover Sport on Facebook

This is the umpteenth time this has happened, guys.

Jeanette Tan | October 24, 2016, 03:52 PM

We've had Starbucks $100 vouchers, Ray-Ban sunglasses, a year's worth of Singapore Airlines flights and countless other too-good-to-be-true "giveaways".

Despite repeated warnings from the original companies, people are continuing to fall for Facebook phishing scams — where random parties set up a vaguely-convincing-looking brand page, plaster a logo as its profile thumbnail, and stage some "like and share" giveaway.

After it's over, and they've harnessed themselves a good size of likes on their page, the page goes quiet so people will forget the "giveaway" happened, morph into a completely different company and start trying to sell you unrelated products.

For what is definitely not the first time, the cycle of scams has returned to Land Rover — a page calling itself "Range Rover 4WD." is staging a giveaway of "3 Range Rover Sport 2016" cars.

Here's a screenshot of the post:

Screenshot from "Range Rover 4WD." Facebook page Screenshot from "Range Rover 4WD." Facebook page

How do you know it's a scam, you might be wondering? Here are some telltale signs we picked up just from looking at a few things:

1. The name of the page.

If there was a legitimate giveaway, it would obviously be presented on Land Rover's official page, wouldn't it?

This is Land Rover's official page, by the way:

Screenshot from Land Rover's Facebook page Screenshot from Land Rover's Facebook page

Note that it also has a verified blue tick. That's an important thing to look out for too.

On the other hand, the name of the giveaway page is "Range Rover 4wD.". With a period, yes. It's not even the accurate name of the car brand — these scam artists should really try harder.

2. The posts on the page.

We also checked out their page and found that that giveaway post was the only one on that page — another telltale sign of a scam. A real brand would have numerous other posts with promotions and links to their official site.

Speaking of posts on the page, guess what we found on the real Land Rover's Facebook page:

Screenshot from Land Rover's Facebook page Screenshot from Land Rover's Facebook page

An advisory! Specifically warning its fans and customers against falling for things like this.

 

And if the above isn't clear enough for you, here's a third thing you can do:

3) Check where the picture is from.

We tried reverse-Google Image searching the picture that was used in this post. Here are some other pages (chiefly on Pinterest) where we found the exact same photo:

Screenshot from Google Image Search Screenshot from Google Image Search

There are at least nine more pages that carry the exact same image.

Still think this is a genuine giveaway? There's always the option of dropping the folks at the real Land Rover Facebook page a message to enquire.

But the rule of thumb is, if it's too good to be true, it probably is.

Do your friends a favour, and report posts like this if you see them to Facebook administrators. And if friends of yours share it, do them a favour and tell them it's a scam.

End of PSA.

Here are some other scams you should read about:

Top 10 scams in Singapore that shouldn’t succeed but do

PSA: Here’s another Jetstar scam that won’t let you win free trips

Here’s a real life WhatsApp chat with an alleged scammer showing how smooth he is

‘Bank of China’ tries to SMS scam Singapore man, gets mercilessly trolled instead

S’pore woman trolls phone scammers pretending to be police, uses their tactics on them

Thousands of men and women in Singapore are getting swindled by online scammers

PSA: Beware of the Ray-Ban Facebook scam

Top photo: Screenshot from Range Rover 4WD. Facebook page.

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