Delta Air Lines, Facebook Users Hit With Viral Giveaway Hoax

hoax_alertA Facebook promotion from “Delta Airways” has gone viral on the site, getting shared nearly 65,000 times in 24 hours. The only issue: the promotion is a hoax, and it’s from an imposter Facebook page.

The fake promotion says that Delta is “celebrating a 100 million customers already this year we’re giving you the chance to win one of 175 gift bags. Each one contains $5,000 in cash, 5 first class tickets to be used till 2016 and some delta goodies.” To win these gift bags, Facebook users are encouraged to share and like the post, thus perpetuating it further across the site.

A Delta representative told Buzzfeed News that they asked Facebook to remove the page, and as of Wednesday afternoon the original page had indeed been shut down. However, another one popped up to replace it soon thereafter.

While scams like this one are widespread, they’re also extremely easy to detect. For instance, Delta’s official name is “Delta Air Lines,” not “Delta Airways.” A small bit of Internet research would immediately prove that the too-good-to-be-true offer really was. In addition, the wording and grammar in the post is riddled with errors that would never be made by such a major company, like lower-casing the “d” in Delta. Lastly, the page carrying the fake offer has no prior posts, appearing as if it popped up overnight (which it did). All of easily-identifiable clues point to the page being a hoax.