What’s in that box? A new iPhone or a fancy kitchen gadget? It’s all part of a $1 Amazon offer shared on Facebook that seems so good it makes Prime Day look overpriced.
But it’s not a deal; it’s a scam.
Several Facebook posts allege that Amazon has so many lost and unclaimed packages piling up in its warehouses that the company is offering them to customers for only $1 apiece.
“By rule, Amazon can throw these packages away, but now they’re running a promotion and giving away random packages for just $1! You can easily get appliances, iPhones, kitchen items, or other items!” one post read.
Some of the posts link to a sign-up form to receive one of these packages. But before you spend your hard-earned buck, pump the brakes — that link leads to malware.
The posts were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
We clicked the link in one of the Facebook posts and immediately got a Google warning that it was a deceptive site called noriat.com. We entered the site into ScamAdviser.com, which rates websites for their trustworthiness and got an extremely low Trustscore — just 1 out of 100.
Other Facebook posts used different links advertising parcels for around $1. But we found that the results were the same — they all lead to faulty websites; none of these posts came from Amazon. We reached out to Amazon for comment, but received no response.
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