No, Amazon is not giving away laptops or selling them for £3

Posts on Facebook claim that the retail giant Amazon is selling Lenovo laptops for £3, and that the company is giving HP laptops, often to over 25s, “as a gift”. 

This is not true. A spokesperson for Amazon told Full Fact these are not genuine offers. 

One post claims that because “Amazon is closing down a warehouse” it is offering “Lenovo laptops for only £3”. The post encourages people to click a link “to find out how to get your laptop” and is accompanied by an image that shows a number of open laptops on a table, seemingly in a shop. A label in front of the laptops features the Amazon logo, and says “Lenovo Ideapad 3 £3.00”.

The link directs users to a website that seems to feature the Amazon logo in its header. Text on the website says that viewers have been “selected to participate in the Amazon campaign” and that they must complete a survey in order to claim a laptop. However, the URL of the website does not match that of Amazon’s real website, and the website’s appearance is also different.

We’ve found multiple examples of another post which claims: “Amazon has decided to give everyone over 25 an HP laptop 15’ as a gift because a batch of laptops were left without boxes due to an error at the sorting centre.” This is accompanied by an image of a woman gesturing towards what appears to be piles of HP laptops.

The post encourages viewers to “Click below to find out how to get your laptop”. The website the link takes people to also seems to feature the Amazon logo in its header, and includes an image of a laptop and a badge that says “Only for £3”. The website says people “have to take a survey to confirm that [they’re] a real person”. Again, the URL of this website does not match the real Amazon site. 

Posts offering fake deals are very common on Facebook. We have fact checked them many times before, with recent examples including supposed offers for various laptops, airfryers, mattresses and PlayStations which, despite claims to the contrary, were nothing to do with the retailer they named. 

It is always worth checking posts sharing offers that seem too good to be true. One way to verify them is to check whether the offer has been shared by the company’s official page, which will often have more followers, a verified blue tick on platforms like Facebook or Instagram, and a longer post history.