What was claimed
Great Western Railway is offering a gift card with a year’s free travel for £1.69.
Our verdict
False. The company has confirmed this is not a genuine offer.
False claims that Great Western Railway is giving away a year’s free travel for £1.69 spread online again
1 November 2023
A post on Facebook falsely claims Great Western Railway (GWR) is offering all UK residents a year’s free travel for less than £2.
The post, which has more than 150 shares, says: “Great Western Railway is running a promotion offering aII UK residents e gift card for a year's free travel for just £1.69 [sic].” It then recommends users “click on the button below and answer a few questions” to claim the “limited” deal, but this link does not appear to work.
GWR confirmed to Full Fact that the offer in the post is not genuine.
The company recently warned users on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) about another post promoting an almost identical fake offer that Full Fact has written about before.
One way to be sure an offer is genuine is by looking to see whether it has been shared by the company’s official page—this will often have more followers, a verified blue tick on Facebook and a longer post history.
In this case, the Facebook page that shared the post has just 92 followers, was set up on 30 August, and has only one post publicly available.
Posts promoting fake offers are common on Facebook and we’ve previously written about examples supposedly offering free tickets to Alton Towers, £2 PlayStations at Argos and Amazon giveaways.
Image courtesy of Superalbs
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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 Great Western Railway has confirmed that this offer is not genuine.