It's still summer holidays, it's still travel time. And what better way to sell fake competitions than by giving away holiday trips?
In this respect, we are not surprised that a supposed Ryanair Germany Facebook page is giving away trips to Mallorca.
However, if you take a closer look, you can see that it is a fake competition and the Ryanair Germany site does not belong to Ryanair.
The following is about this status message on Facebook:

With this status report we are also dealing with a typical fake competition. These fake competitions usually take place in three steps.
1. The bait: The competition on Facebook
The first step is always the bait. This bait usually appears in the form of a status message on Facebook, a WhatsApp message or, in rare cases, an Instagram message. These baits are all identical in nature: they convey the prospect of a win that you essentially already have in your pocket. With the ease of participation, they entice you to take part and lure you to a website. This is the bait . The bait is the viral entry into the competition process.
In our case, the bait is my status message on Facebook, which was posted by a fake Ryanair Germany page. The competition description reads as follows:
We are giving away thirteen (13x) 7-day all-inclusive trips to Mallorca including flight/hotel for 2 people!
To take part in the competition, follow these steps:
– Like//and Share//and Comment (with your first name).
– Write us a message with “Participated”The competition runs until Monday, August 5th, 2018, 12:00 p.m.
2. The Bridge: A Message!
Why do you as a participant have to send a message all at once? Quite simply, this method lures the user to an external website that contains a competition form. AND THAT'S THE POINT! It's about the user's data, because it's worth money! So if you send a message with “Participated”, you will get a reply in the same second because there is a bot behind it.
Goal of the bridge: A link is installed that should lead to the supposed profit.

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 their 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.
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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 )

