Hi everyone!
I started noticing a lot of these Facebook anniversary scams on my wall. The scams are in my case in Danish, and are currently targeting Scandinavia, where I live. (The SAS scam is also showing up in Swedish and Norwegian). But I’m not doubting for a second that these won’t pop up in other countries as well.

First off, I’ll just show a couple of them, and how they look.

The ScamDinavian Airlines on Facebook

How it looks

The first one is this; Scandinavian Airlines, SAS, is giving out 2 free tickets for their 71-year anniversary, as shown below.

The post comment reads “Tak #SAS“, meaning “Thanks #SAS“. Noticable here is, that sas-denmark.com is not actually a domain, owned by Scandinavian Airlines. (Read more on how to know, below)

Once you click the post, you’ll be met with the following screen.

You are faced with 3 different questions, where first question is: “Have you ever traveled with us?” – with possible answers: “Yes” and “None”. Yes, indeed, it translates to “none” and not “no“. Also worth mentioning is that there is always….. always… 764 tickets left.

All 3 questions will be as easy to answer. And here’s why.
Once you answer the third question, you get the following screen:

First thing you have to do after completion, is to click “Share“, and then write “Tak #SAS“.
Step 2, you have to click the like button, and then it’s “waiting for verification”.

The Marlboro scam

There is an equal one for Marlboro, stating that Marlboro will give away 5 cartons of cigarettes to all! On their 100th anniversary.

That does sound quite impressive, as 1 pack of Marlboro costs 44 DKK (~5.9 EUR). So they are said to be handing out cigarettes, worth of 2.200 DKK (~300 EUR) to everybody.

As seen above, you get sent to this page, same as the SAS page, with 3 easy questions. This question reads: “Have you ever smoked Marlboro?”, with possible answers: “Yes”, “None”, “Remember not”. The language is full of amazing grammar, any Danish teacher would be proud (not).

How to know it’s fake

Language

When the target pages start out with, eg.

• “You have been selected to participate in…”
• “Hurry! Only X amount left…”

Additionally the text is very poorly translated, such as the answer buttons. Also the posts themselves are not grammatically correct, which we can assume they would be, if big companies, such as Marlboro or Scandinavian Airlines actually did make a contest or whatever this could be called. Last but not least, some of the text is not even translated!

Domains

It’s always a good idea, to check the root of the domain. The domain here is:

In this case, you can try to go to marlboro-dk.com to see what it shows. Not to mention that the  in front of the URL, meaning the connection between you and the server is un-encrypted. Which it would/should never be. Going to marlboro-dk.com shows as follows:

This clearly shows that the website is empty and already now, you should be 100% sure and close the page. However, it’s easy to set up a redirect from marlboro-dk.com to the actual page of Marlboro, so you can’t rely on this, if it sends you to the company’s website.

You can then go to https://www.whois.com/ and search for the domain in question, which will show the following for the two domains:

Marlboro, which is seen above. As seen, it states; “Domain Name: marlboro-dk.com“, and further below, is says the domain was created 15th of August 2017. For sure Marlboro has been around for more than a couple of days.

SAS, as seen above, states “Domain Name: sas-denmark.com“, and further below, says the domain was created the 14th of August 2017. I’m also pretty sure that SAS has been around, with a Danish website, being SCANDINAVIAN Airlines, for more than just a couple of days.

Why “they” would do this to you

Now you might be asking; “But why, Brian? Why would they be so mean to me, and have me answer questions for no reason?”.

There can be a number of reasons, why people would set up these sites, a couple of examples could be…

• Money from advertisements when you click. (imagine something like this, spreading on social media, with them earning per time you click).
• Building up a network of people for the next big scam.

Think before clicking, sharing and liking things!

Out,
Brian