Great Western Railway is running a promotion offering all UK residents a gift card for a year’s free travel for £1.69.
The rail company has confirmed publicly that this is not true, and has warned people to take care when interacting with Facebook pages offering such deals.
Hundreds of people have shared a fake offer on Facebook, claiming that UK residents can get a year’s free travel through Great Western Railway (GWR) for just £1.69.
The post says: “Great Western Railway is running a promotion offering all UK residents a gift card for a year's free travel for just £1.69.
“Simply click on the button below and answer a few questions to receive your card. The number of cards available is limited!”
The post also has a button you can click, which takes you through to a webpage designed to look like a GWR page but has an unrelated URL.
The page asks the viewer to answer three basic questions, and then play a short scratchcard-style game. Another page then loads, where viewers are invited to enter their details to “win” before being asked for payment details.
These pages also have GWR branding, but most of the buttons do not work and again the URL is unrelated to the company.
GWR has confirmed on its own Facebook page that the offer is not real.
The post says: “You may have seen this on your Facebook timelines. Please be aware that this is NOT a genuine offer and nothing to do with GWR.
“Please take extra care when interacting with pages who claim to be working with verified organisations.
“This page has been reported and hopefully Facebook will take swift action to remove it.”
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 48 followers, was set up on 17 August, and has only one post publicly available.
Posts like these are extremely common on Facebook, often generating thousands of shares, and we have recently fact checked a number of them which have appeared in the form of coupons for businesses such as Alton Towers and Aldi.
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Image courtesy of Sid Balachandran |
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 is not a genuine offer.
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