Carefully consider the offer before following a profile

Jun 1, 2015 15:32 GMT  ·  By

Scammers trying to inflate their number of followers on Instagram started to run a trick on the gullible, promising free gift cards worth $150 / €137 for Michael Kors products.

The scheme is simple and highly alluring, as it offers great odds to be part of the group of winners. To make the offer more believable, a link to the legitimate online store is provided, from where the crooks say the voucher can be redeemed.

Simple math makes the offer suspicious

The message is brief and announces that, in order to be eligible for the prize, a user has to follow the Instagram account and share the promotion with others, in an effort to ensure that the scam is distributed to other potential victims.

In a blog post from Online Threat Alerts on Sunday, a picture with the fake promotion showed that the account had 3,752 followers, although it posted only six times and followed 55 other profiles.

“First 8k to follow and repost will receive a 150$ gift card via email. Redeemable in store and online destinationkors.com,” the bogus announcement read.

Taking a moment and calculating the investment in this campaign should make someone think twice before clicking the “follow” button. That would be pouring $1.2 / €1.1 million into the raffle, without any control over the audience, which would give the company an expectation on the number of customers gained in the long term.

Visibility is the only purpose of the scam

Although the user does not get scammed right away, they help the crooks increase their visibility on the social network, offering the possibility to run more dangerous campaigns in the future.

Increasing the number of followers allows them to devise more elaborate scams, potentially targeting the very followers. Alternatively, highly visible profiles are considered to be trustworthy and benefit from more attention from search engines.

Users should be wary of incredible offers shared over social networks, as they can also lead to phishing, spam, or promotions for counterfeit products.