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Several times over the last few years social Facebook posts have appeared proposing that users who followed instructions to like and share them could win myriad prizes in a purported giveaway sponsored by Ellen DeGeneres: The Ellen DeGeneres Show does run segments involving prize giveaways that may have online components, including ties to official social media accounts, but not ones involving randomly choosing viewers who like and share posts stemming from counterfeit Facebook accounts such as the one shown above. Any legitimate promotional offer using Facebook should be tied to an account bearing a blue badge indicating the account has been verified by Facebook as authentic: As we have noted on previous pages about similar hoaxes, these counterfeit promotional posts exhibit a number of red flags, primarily that the underlying pages are not endorsed by any official channel associated with Ellen DeGeneres: The aim of schemes such as the celebrity giveaway hoaxes are typically to rapidly build a large Facebook following in order to sell pages with high like counts to third parties. While such hoaxes appear to present little risk to participants, liking and sharing the false information is not entirely safe: in addition to advancing the interests of and encouraging social media scammers, page likes potentially enable user data mining by scammers. And in some cases, the giveaway hoaxes lure victims into downloading malware-bearing files.
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