Beware of too-good-to-be-true ‘Amazon’ offers on Facebook - here’s how to spot them

In the last year we've fact checked at least 10 examples of fake offers supposedly from Amazon circulating on social media, promising everything from iPads to Dyson vacuum cleaners at very low prices or even for free. We wrote about one such offer, for laptops, earlier this week.

These are not genuine Amazon deals and spokespeople for the company have repeatedly told us they are not legitimate. But we have sometimes seen them engaged with or commented on hundreds of times—so this week, with Amazon’s Prime Day promotion in full swing, we wanted to warn people about what to look out for.

These kinds of bogus offer posts tend to share photos of piles of boxes or products in a warehouse with someone poorly edited into the picture beside them, while captions urge social media users to fill in surveys or follow links to claim the deal.

The web pages these links lead to often look like poor imitations of the real Amazon website but have different URL addresses to the official one, while others appear to have no connection with the retailer at all. Sometimes the web pages ask people for their personal information and payment details.

This isn’t a problem unique to Amazon. We also see lots of posts making false claims about other retailers too, such as Argos, Tesco and John Lewis.

Here are some tips on what to watch out for to keep yourself safe online:

• Always double-check posts sharing offers that seem too good to be true—if a post is promising a £3 Samsung TV or £1.78 PlayStation 5 console, it’s probably not legit.
• Check whether an offer has been shared by a company’s official page on social media, which will often have a high number of followers, a verified blue tick on platforms like Facebook or Instagram and a long post history.
• If you are encouraged to click a link, a different URL and page layout to the official website can be giveaways that something isn’t quite right. As can grammatical errors in the text.

For more tips, see the National Cyber Security Centre website.