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‘My Team and I Are Doing a $100 Cash Giveaway’ Facebook Multi-Level Marketing Meme Claim Facebook users are giving away $100 if you comment your favorite ice cream, Disney movie, etc. Rating Not True Like this fact check? Reporting In January 2020, a number of Facebook posts promoting a $100 cash giveaway appeared on Facebook, almost all with nearly identical wording. The $100 cash giveaway posts seemed to have one thing in common — those promising $100 to participating friends were all involved with multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes such as ItWorks. Typically, the posts were worded in such a way it suggested many friends might participate, placing a cap of 100 comments on the entries (although most posts had far fewer than 100 comments). Some of the posts were text-only, often suspiciously sharing random capitalized words and an order of emojis : My Team and I are doing a $100 CASH GIVEAWAY!!! First 100 comments can get an entry!!!❤😍🤗 *no purchase necessary* Others used a hybrid survey and contest format, eliciting Facebook users to comment their favorite flavor of ice cream (or something else ) for a chance to win. Again, the wording and emojis were clearly copied and pasted from elsewhere: The first 100 people to drop their favorite kind of Ice Cream 🍦 in the comments will be entered into my Giveaway 💰 🎉$100 CASH 🎉 I’ll message you to confirm your entry! 〰️〰️〰️No Purchase Necessary 〰️〰️〰️ Florida is where wokes go to die... Please enable JavaScript Florida is where wokes go to die The first 100 people to drop their favorite kind of Ice Cream 🍦 in the comments will be entered into my Giveaway 💰 🎉$100 CASH 🎉 I’ll message you to confirm your entry! 〰️〰️〰️No Purchase Necessary 〰️〰️〰️ Drop a GIF of your favorite Disney Movie to be entered into this months $100 Cash Giveaway. No purchase necessary. #ThisShouldBeGood Spates of $100 cash giveaway posts hosted by ItWorks-affiliated individuals in late December 2019 and January 2020 were not new in those months. In May 2019, a Reddit user shared a post to an anti-MLM subreddit about a similar trend of Facebook posts: Every It Works hun has been posting about doing 500 dollar cash giveaway to a winner in the comments but I know the ones on my friend list can’t afford to actually give 500 dollars away so is it just a blatant lie? from antiMLM No purchase necessary was a frequent but not constant element of the posts, due to strict Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rules about sweepstakes, giveaways, and prizes. Online contests typically are required to disclose the manner in which they’re operated, but the posts didn’t seem to be disclosing anything about their scope or terms and conditions in general: If you’re planning to promote a sweepstakes or contest over any of these communication channels, it’s important to disclose the material terms and conditions of the promotion (eligibility requirements, prizes that can be won, and start and end times for example) and not advertise the sweepstakes in a deceptive way. Like the FTC, the FCC doesn’t directly oversee sweepstakes, but will step in if they see a promotion violating these rules. Legal advice about the frequently sticky area of promotions and promises of cash giveaways included information seemingly in conflict with the posts, such as liability incurred by vague claims as well as formal notification of winners: 4. Set the rules. A major area of liability comes from entrants who challenge the contest if they don’t win. Make sure the rules are clear on how a winner is chosen and the details of the contest. Then post it somewhere people can find it. 5. Notify winners by email, not social media. Facebook and Twitter are a good way to promote a contest or sweepstakes that you’re running, but many social media companies want to avoid liability too. Even if it’s not expressly banned by the terms of service, it’s best to keep social media out of it when contacting winners. After a round of mid-January 2020 round of $100 cash giveaway posts, few posted the promised followup thread announcing a winner. But a separate search indicated that those who did typically provided the same exact name as the others. Those posts appeared to involve one centralized purported drawing, carried out by an ItWorks customer on their phone: https://www.facebook.com/sherilynn.couvdosalcala/videos/10162780513735507/ The biggest risk in engaging with such a fabricated promise involved being drawn into a multi-level marketing scam and losing hundreds or thousands of dollars in the process; 99 percent of all people falling prey to MLMs lose money, according to information hosed on the FTC’s website [ PDF ]: With every MLM, where such data was available, and after debunking the deceptions in their reporting, the loss rate was at least 99%, using liberal assumptions relating to retention and cost of participation, as explained in subsequent sections of this chapter. The average loss rate for the 30 MLMs reported here was 99.6%. January 2020 was one of several months that MLMs claimed to be hosting a $100 cash giveaway on their personal Facebook pages. Chances are if you had an ItWorks mark on your friends list, you saw a post like the ones excerpted above. In most cases, we found no followup winners posted, and the ones we did find all involved the same winner. Sweepstakes, contests, and $100 cash giveaways are all subject to FTC guidelines about transparency, and informal vague giveaways seem to fall in a legally gray area. Posted in Disinformation , Fact Checks Tagged $100 cash giveaway , fake , fake contests , hunbots , itworks , mlm huns , MLM scam , MLMs , viral facebook posts
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