SURVEY SCAM – ‘Get 5 Free Cineworld Movie Tickets’

According to a post being distributed on Facebook, you can get five free movie tickets from the UK’s Cineworld Cinemas. Supposedly, Cineworld is giving away the tickets due to its 1ooth anniversary. However, the post is not associated with Cineworld and those who click will not receive any free movie tickets.

The post is a typical Facebook scam designed to trick you into spamming your Facebook friends and divulging your personal information via dodgy survey websites.

If you click the post in the hope of grabbing your free tickets, you will be taken to a fraudulent prize claim website designed to look like it is part of Facebook. The site tells you that, to get your tickets, you must first share the information via Facebook and then send a site link to 5 Facebook groups you belong to. If you comply with these ‘2 simple steps’, you are effectively spamming your friends and fellow group members on behalf of the scammers.

And, even after you complete the required steps and click the claim button, you will still not get your free tickets. Instead, a popup window will appear that claims that you must verify your entry by participating in an online survey. The popup will contain links to several available surveys.

Clicking the links will take you to various third-party websites that offer you the chance to win prizes in exchange for supplying you name and contact details. However, entry conditions included on the sites will state that the information you supply will be shared with site sponsors and other marketing groups. Thus, after participating, you will begin receiving unwanted and annoying phone calls, emails, and surface letters from companies trying to sell you various products and services.

In some versions, the survey page will ask for your mobile phone number as part of the entry procedure. However, fine print on the page will state that, by supplying your number, you are actually subscribing to an ongoing SMS ‘club’ that will charge you several dollars for every text message they send you.

Meanwhile, the scammers who created the fake Cineworld post will earn affiliate commissions every time a person participates in one of the surveys. And no amount of participation will ever get you the promised free tickets, which never existed to begin with.

For the record, Cineworld was founded in 1995 so even the 100th anniversary claim in the scam post is a lie.

Scams similar to this one are very common on Facebook. Be wary of any Facebook post that claims that you can win free tickets, vouchers, coupons, holidays, tech products, or luxury cars just by liking, sharing, and filling in surveys.