Holiday season, hurray! Isn't it great when you get free tickets to the Familypark for the whole family?

Unfortunately, we have to curb the euphoria because these WhatsApp messages that you receive from various contacts are a bait competition.

This is the following WhatsApp message:

"Hello! The Familypark is giving 4 free tickets to 500 families for its 50th anniversary. I just got one from here: http://www.familypark-at.win/ Have fun and thank me later.”

Hello! The Familypark is giving 4 free tickets to 500 families for its 50th anniversary. I just got one from here.: http://www.familypark-at.win/ Have fun and thank me later.

Bait competitions?

Bait competition means that you are promised a great prize, in this case 4 free tickets for 500 families for the family park, but in the end you are only linked to corresponding commission programs.

Overall, one can say that WhatsApp users are being unknowingly tricked by their own friends, because these pre-formulated messages exploit the relationship of trust between two people by suggesting that the message was written personally by the acquaintance and is therefore considered credible by the recipient is classified.

This WhatsApp message contains a constructed web address that does not belong to Familypark. It should be mentioned at this point: The Family Park has no connection with this bait competition and has absolutely nothing to do with any commission programs that may be linked!

Identical process!

Since all of these competitions are identical (whether Knoppers, Adidas or Haribo are mentioned), we will repeat the explanation of how they work here:

What's happening here!

You will receive the message shown above from a contact via WhatsApp! This message is the so-called competition bait. This bait creates a promise of winning and suggests that you basically already have the winnings in your pocket. The fraudsters lure people with the ease of participation and lure them to a website. The bait is the viral entry into the competition process. As soon as you follow the link, a website opens on your smartphone.

This website appears to be a supposed competition with a question and answer session. It is only intended to simulate the character of a competition. We also call this step the bridge . The bridge takes the form of a fake competition. In this bridge, you are usually promised a win directly, deception is used and fake elements are used.

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Ultimately, this bridge is also an illegal component because the promises made are not kept and the structure and presentation uses protected graphic elements. The corporate design of existing companies and their products are mercilessly exploited; on the bridge people also like to pretend to be the company depicted. Goal of the bridge:

a) Generate virality (example: forward this competition to 20 contacts).
b) A link is installed that should lead to the supposed prize.

By the way, you will also be asked to send this fake competition to several contacts on WhatsApp.

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And this is how it all ends:

In the third and final step you will be linked to 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 running 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 will end up with dubious WAP billing stories or opaque subscription services.

Conclusion:

The promise of getting a family free ticket for the Family Park remains unfulfilled. Instead, you end up in viral commission programs. So if you receive these types of messages, you should ignore them!


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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 )