What was claimed
Fortnum & Mason is selling ‘Family Hampers’ for £10 to people aged over 40 who fill in a short questionnaire.
Our verdict
False. The company has confirmed this isn’t a genuine offer.
Fortnum & Mason isn’t selling ‘Family Hampers’ for £10 to the over-40s
Posts being shared on Facebook falsely claim that the retailer Fortnum & Mason is selling a “Family Hamper” for £10 to people over the age of 40 or 50 who “fill out a short questionnaire”.
The company confirmed to Full Fact that this is not a genuine offer.
The posts claim to be written by someone whose daughter works at Fortnum & Mason, and say the retailer is “clearing out seasonal stock” and “offering it for next to nothing”. Facebook users are encouraged to follow a link to fill out a questionnaire, but this doesn’t take people to the real Fortnum & Mason website—the URL doesn’t match, and the layout is missing the menu and pages of the actual site, despite featuring the company’s logo.
We’ve seen many social media posts sharing fake offers supposedly from retailers such as Marks & Spencer, Argos and Amazon. It’s always worth checking posts sharing offers that seem too good to be true. One way to verify if an offer is real is to see whether it 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 this is not a genuine offer from Fortnum & Mason.