Facebook’s Disneyland Summer Vacation Like To Win? Not So Fast

Have you seen a Facebook “Disneyland SuMMer Vacation” giveaway on Facebook, requiring you to simply like and share a post?

The Facebook posts for “Disneyland SuMMer Vacation” free passes are like the ones we see for free iPads, free iMacs, and basically any other high value and much-desired item no one has ever once gotten for free because they clicked “Like” on Facebook.

Well, maybe not entirely — the “Disneyland SuMMer Vacation” page and its clones are certainly scams, but companies do sometimes give away free stuff in Like-based contests. (I once won a $100 gift card to my favorite casual NYC restaurant Virgil’s this way, and it was probably the happiest day of my life.)

The difference is, of course, the entity involved in a legit Facebook contest. If the brand of origin or another brand you trust (such as a major retailer or media outlet) is giving away free passes for Disneyland or Disney World on Facebook, you probably have a shot, or the competition is at least on the up and up. However long the odds may be.

However, we often see Facebook scams like the free Disney tickets hoax with this comment added, or something similar: “why not? Can’t hurt!”

In actuality, the scams on Facebook centering around getting your “likes” can indeed hurt — generally, the pages are “like farming,” which in and of itself only costs you a click. Innocent?

Not so much, Hoax Slayer explains:

“Like-farmers try to garner as many likes for their bogus pages as possible in the shortest possible time… Pages with high like numbers can later be sold on the black market, renamed and re-branded to suit the goals of the buyer, and used to promote the buyer’s products or services. They can also be used to collect personal information from participants, and function as platforms for other types of fraudulent activity.”

So while a Disney Summer Vacation may be attractive to almost everyone, these Facebook scams are best ignored — the best case scenario is some scammer makes money, but it could be a lot worse.