Heathrow Airport is holding its annual unclaimed baggage sale for charity with suitcases on offer for £8.29.
Heathrow has said it has no connection with the Facebook post making this claim and is holding no such sale. Lost baggage from air passengers is sometimes sold at auction.
A post claiming Heathrow is selling unclaimed baggage for £8.29 is being shared on Facebook, but this is not affiliated with the airport.
The post shares photos of dozens of suitcases, and says: “Heathrow Airport International Airport [sic] is holding its annual unclaimed baggage sale for just £8.29”. It claims that “the airport can dispose of luggage that has not been checked in for more than 6 months”, and that it “has organised a charity sale”.
The post links to a separate webpage that has the Heathrow logo at the top, and says: “Take the survey to confirm you are a real person and get one of the suitcases”. Following these steps then leads to another page that asks for personal information and payment details.
However, this is not a genuine offer. A spokesperson for Heathrow has confirmed to Full Fact that this post is not associated with the airport, and said that passengers’ baggage is the responsibility of airlines. We could not find any reports of Heathrow hosting an upcoming charity sale on its website or social media channels.
Moreover, the URL address of the webpage linked to in the post is not the same as the official Heathrow website, and the buttons on the page do not work properly.
Major airlines do reportedly sell lost luggage left at Heathrow through auction houses, which people are able to buy. However, this post does not appear to be affiliated with any auction house.
We’ve written about many other posts promoting fake deals from other retailers, including those that link to similar webpages asking users to complete a survey and submit card details.
It is always worth double-checking whether posts sharing offers that seem too good to be true actually are. If a deal is genuine, it’s likely to have been shared by a company’s official page, which will typically have lots of followers, a verified blue tick on platforms like Facebook or Instagram and a significant 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 Heathrow Airport has said it is not associated with this post.
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