What was claimed
Lidl is selling Smeg brand kettles for £3.
Our verdict
False. Lidl told Full Fact all genuine offers will appear on its website, and searching it for ‘Smeg’ produces no results.
Lidl is not selling Smeg kettles for £3
Posts shared on Facebook have suggested Lidl is selling kettles by the homeware brand Smeg for £3 as part of a promotion. But this isn’t the case.
A spokesperson for the company told Full Fact that genuine offers will appear on its website. A search for “Smeg” on its site produced no results, and this product didn’t appear in searches for “kettle” either.
Two posts feature an image of a red kettle with the brand ‘Smeg’ across its side, alongside a receipt seemingly from Lidl and totalling £3. The account that posted it claims their husband works at Lidl, and said: “Lіdl is ending its contract with Smеg and needs to clear out the remaining stock by the end of the month, so this is a one-of-a-kind opportunity.”
It directs readers to “fill out a short form” to claim the offer, but the webpage it links to is not associated with the retailer.
Although this website features the Lidl logo and menu options such as ‘Store finder and opening hours’, a clue that this website isn’t genuine is the fact that the URL does not match that of the official Lidl website, which also displays different menu options.
A third post features very similar wording, but also says “Don’t buy SMEG Kettle until you read this!” [sic]. This post also contains an image of a red Smeg branded kettle alongside what appears to be a Lidl receipt featuring a price of “£3,00”, as well as three other images of the kettle.
Lidl told Full Fact: “To ensure a Lidl product is genuine, we always advise customers to purchase items directly from a Lidl store. Additionally, customers can find genuine promotions and offers on our website.”
Posts offering fake deals are very common on Facebook and we’ve fact checked many similar posts, including for stores like Argos. Recent examples include false offers for various laptops, airfryers, mattresses and PlayStations which were supposedly available at improbably cheap prices.
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 the offer does not appear on Lidl’s website, where the retailer told Full Fact all genuine offers will appear.