Free wine? Free wine.
That’s the claim currently bouncing around Facebook, at any rate. As with all things Internet, it requires a little digging around to get to the truth – and for wine lovers, that truth might be a little too sour to stomach.
The current target of scammer’s affections is a well-known brand called Barefoot Wine, and as you can see they’re having some trouble [1], [2], [3], [4] with people making offers of freebies on their behalf:
We’ve seen spam for this being posted to numerous websites via social media feeds – here’s just three of many examples:
The posts claim the following:
BareFoot Wine is Giving FREE cases of wine to celebrate 50th Anniversary (230 Left)
The spam run is taking place at this very moment, and has been ongoing for the last day or so (at least). It’s also currently jumping the fence from Facebook to Twitter – here’s a whole bunch of Twitter posts totalling 200+ over the last 13 hours:
No matter where you witness the spam post – and people have been seeing it all over the place – there’s always 230 cases left which would be the first clue that something is not quite right. The second clue is that the above URL is registered via an anonymity service in Panama.
The destination site is typical survey spam fodder:
The page creators want it to be shared on Facebook, then sent to “5 groups” to be able to claim the wine. Once the multiple shares have taken place, our would-be wine enthusiast will be shown the below page:
To access this premium content please fill out one of the surveys below:
Well, okay…movies and wine could work. Clicking the link didn’t take us to anything movie related, however – we got this instead:
Certified winner claim form
It mentions a Samsung TV, a Dell Inspiron, an iPad Mini and a $50 SkyAuction savings certificate. No movies so far. What else do we have here?
Grand Prize Value Disclosure
It then goes on to ask for name, address, postcode, city, country and an email address.
To summarise: no movies, no wine but I might have won a television.
Maybe I could watch “Great vineyards of our time” on it…
Christopher Boyd
