What was claimed
Aldi is giving away free food boxes worth £40 or £50 to people who engage with certain social media posts.
Our verdict
Aldi has confirmed this is not a genuine offer.
Aldi is not giving away ‘free food boxes’ on Facebook
A number of posts on Facebook have claimed that the supermarket chain Aldi is giving away “free food boxes” worth either £40 or £50 to people who engage with the posts, such as by reacting with a “thumbs up” or commenting “food”.
However, these posts are not associated with the retailer and there’s no evidence these offers are genuine. A spokesperson for Aldi confirmed that these offers were not from the supermarket.
The text of many of the posts, some of which claim to have been written by managers at Aldi, appear very similar.
One says: “Hi, I’m Jasper Cornwell, and I’m a manager at Aldi. During these challenging times, we’re stepping up to lend a helping hand by offering free food boxes worth £40, packed with essential groceries, to everyone who gives us a thumbs up! This initiative is our way of supporting families and ensuring they have access to vital supplies. Please note, it’s one box per household. Plus, as an extra surprise, we’ve hidden a £200 voucher in a hundred randomly selected boxes!”
A comment underneath the post says that once people have “LIKED” the post, they should click a link to a website and “follow the simple details to get your FREE Food box”.
Other posts feature different text, but advertise the same offer, and have comments encouraging people to visit the same website.
The website people are encouraged to go to does not match the URL of the official Aldi website, however. And while Aldi’s logo is visible in the top left corner of the linked site, it otherwise does not match the real Aldi site.
We couldn’t find any evidence of the offer appearing on Aldi’s official website, or of it being shared by Aldi’s verified Facebook page. Aldi told us that real offers would be posted on either of these platforms.
This is not the first time we’ve seen Facebook posts falsely claiming Aldi is giving away parcels of free food.
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 Aldi has confirmed this is not a genuine offer.