What was claimed
Amazon is giving away or selling laptops for £3 to people aged over 40.
Our verdict
False. Amazon has confirmed that this is not a legitimate offer or advert associated with the retailer.
No, Amazon is not ‘giving away’ laptops to the over 40s
A number of posts on Facebook have claimed that Amazon is “giving away” laptops to people aged either over 40 or over 50.
But this isn’t the case. A spokesperson for Amazon confirmed to Full Fact that these are not legitimate offers or adverts from Amazon.
One of the posts claims that Amazon is “giving away all laptops from 2022-2024 to UK residents aged 50+ and over”. Another says that Amazon is “giving away laptops that have been in stock for over a year to people aged 40 and over for just £3”.
Images shared alongside the posts show piles of unboxed laptops branded with the HP logo, seemingly displayed in stores or warehouses.
The posts then encourage users to click the accompanying link, with some specifically telling users to answer questions too. The links take users to a website that features the Amazon logo. It tells people that they have “been selected to participate in the promotion from Amazon” and that they have “a chance to win” an HP laptop “for only £3”.
However, there are a number of clues that this is not Amazon’s genuine website. The URL, for example, doesn’t match that of the official site. There are also grammatical errors in the text displayed, and the layout differs substantially from Amazon’s real website.
This is not the first time we’ve written about posts falsely promoting giveaways from Amazon, including those supposedly promoting offers for TVs, laptops, and iPads.
It is always worth checking posts sharing offers that seem too good to be true. One way to verify this is to see whether the offer has been shared by the company’s official page—this will often have more followers, a verified blue tick on platforms like Facebook or Instagram and a longer post history.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because Amazon has confirmed this is not a legitimate offer or advert associated with the company.