Apple Giving away Free iPhone - Hoax Analysis

Story:

WOOWW,,Apple Giving away free iphone at http://freeiphone495426.tumblr.com/ Get Yours fast 🙂

Other Versions

Apple Giving Away Free Iphone Celebrating Iphone 5 Success (link)
More than 600 iphones left for free give away, Hurry up

Analysis:

This is a message shared on Facebook, coming with a link saying that Apple is giving away 600 free iPhones celebrating the success of iPhone 5, and asks to click the link to get it fast. It is not a fact, but a scam of affiliate marketers and advertisers who in fact mislead you to Samsung Galaxy Note 2 incredible art piece initiative.

Screenshot of Apple Giving away Free iPhone Scam Process

These messages are circulating with various links. The link in the message above appears related to Tumblr, making it look genuine, but when clicked, Facebook clearly notifies that the site may be unsafe. Further, you will get a pop up message saying that a verification is required and that you need to sign up for a free account of Snapdeal. When you click the sign up link, instead of taking to Snapdeal, it redirects you to official Samsung Galaxy Note 2 incredible art piece initiative – a Guinness world record attempt for the most artists working on the same art installation. This requests you to enter your name, email id and phone number and then submit your art. This way the advertising and affiliate scammers make you contribute to this record attempt of Samsung India, and you can also get your contribution in the form of a personalized merchandise if you can get 100 friends/invites to contribute. Also, the best art-piece per week wins a Samsung Galaxy Note 2. This is what the scammers want to take advantage of.

When you click the link in the message, you can notice that the URL shifts between Affiliatevia and Adscendmedia websites, both of which are affiliate marketing and tracking companies. Although the particular link in the message above seems to be taken off by tumblr, all this clearly indicates that these messages are clever scams of advertisers and affiliate marketers to attract people, especially the Apple iPhone fans, mislead them with a free iPhone give away and then make them submit their art to be a part of Guinness record attempt of Samsung. There is no iPhone give away, all this only benefits the scammers.