Post offering free Toby Carvery hamper is fake

27 February 2026

A Facebook post has falsely claimed that Toby Carvery is giving everyone who likes the post and comments “Special” a “free hamper filled with goodies” to “celebrate 50 special years of Toby Carvery”.

A spokesperson for Mitchells & Butlers told Full Fact this isn’t a genuine offer.

The post claims to be written by “Paul Sinclair, CEO of Toby Carvery”. But Toby Carvery is owned by Mitchells & Butlers, the CEO of which is Phil Urban. Searches for “Paul Sinclair” returned no results connected with either company name.

When we performed a Google reverse image search on an image of a suited man holding a hamper being shared alongside the post it told us the image was “made with Google AI”. Further evidence that the image isn’t genuine includes the fact that lettering throughout it contains misspellings and nonsensical lettering.

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