This competition involves lying and cheating!
What a surprise: the holiday season is approaching and we are seeing fake competitions with flight tickets on Facebook again. How many years have scammers been trying this scam? Actually, as they say, “you can’t ride a dead horse,” but apparently this fake competition method should still work.
This viral game is all about: According to the organizer, in this competition you can order 2 free tickets. But be careful: This competition is a so-called fake competition. Mimikama explains what is really happening and how thousands of people are being misled.
Fake competitions have been found on Facebook for years and are used for different purposes. The whole method is not new, nor is the technology behind it. At this point we can therefore describe again that this is a method that takes place in 3 steps. We show these steps below:
1. The bait: The competition on Facebook
The first step is always the bait. This bait often appears in the form of a status message on Facebook (see picture above). The bait conveys the prospect of a win that you basically already have in your pocket. With its ease of participation, it entices you to take part and attracts you to a website. It represents the viral entry into the competition process.
In our case, the bait is a status message on Facebook that leads to a fake Aegean website. You can clearly see from the artificial web address that someone is trying with all their might to present themselves as Aegean Airlines.
2. The Bridge: A Message!
A round of questions appears on that website to help you qualify. However, these “quiz questions” have no further meaning because it doesn’t matter what answers you give. Participants always “qualify”.
At the same time, participants are asked to share the competition on Facebook. This increases the reach of the fake competition.
Particularly nasty: this bridge cheekily claims to be Aegean. The logo and corporate identity of Aegean are used. We must make it very clear: Aegean has no connection with this fraudulent website and the competition!
Why do participants have to go through this process? First of all, the character of a competition is established through the question round. Immediately after the question round, all participants are informed that they have won. However, that is a blatant lie!
At this point the participants get the feeling that they have the tickets in their pocket. At the same time, the claim is made that you should only take part in a survey.
Now comes an intermediate step that is important for virality: you have to become part of the competition yourself by sharing it and liking a Facebook page. This makes you a multiplier and a tool for the organizer.
Only then will a link be displayed that will lead to the supposed prize. This link leads to the 3rd step.
3. The conclusion
The third and final step is a so-called affiliate program. You leave the bridge via a link that contains an affiliate code that belongs to a commission program. This is an affiliate whose content, if possible, correlates with the fake competition taking place in the bridge. We call this final link the exit. Note: The exit itself, i.e. the affiliates that are linked to, is not illegal! These are business models in which the respective provider of such programs compensates its sales partners through commissions. These sales partners are recognized by the provider through an identification code, so that every newly registered participant in the affiliate competition can also be assigned to the sales partner.
By the way, the person who designs the bridge freely decides which partner program he uses as an exit. We also often find systems that read the participant's origin and device information and thus direct them specifically to different commission programs. Therefore, you can never say clearly which commission program will ultimately be used; in the worst case, you end up with dubious WAP billing stories or opaque subscription services.
The fake counts!
Therefore, the author of Bait and Bridge, who is also likely to be the respective sales partner of the affiliate provider, has a great interest in ensuring that his fake story sounds as credible as possible in advance, but at the same time also has a high potential for virality.
In the case of fake news and fake competitions, lying well is already half the battle.
Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )