A website disguised as a voucher gift card portal for the fast food restaurant chain, KFC, has been caught scamming people on the internet. A lot of Pakistanis have fallen for the scam, forcing us to write about it and raise awareness.
The website, called KFC Voucher Giftcard Coupons, poses itself as a gift card website. When you visit it, it’ll ask you some basic questions about if you are a regular customer, how many times do you visit KFC, etc. They are more of a formality to disguise it as a valid quiz to win a voucher, even though none of the questions are even remotely hard. Whichever answer you choose, you’ll likely end up “winning” the voucher.
Once you’ve indeed passed the question and answers phase, it’ll ask you to share it by clicking on the big green “Share” button 10 times. Even though it says that you have to share on Facebook, it takes you to share on Facebook and you have to manually share on WhatsApp. Though, it doesn’t matter and it thinks you have shared it when you click on the Share button once.
For what it’s worth, it’ll even show that it is checking your answers and do a “Double Registrations check”(what?) to make the whole thing look more believable. Do all that, give them your full name, email address and click on the Continue button and they promise to ship a Rs.5000 voucher to your address.
Below it, you can also see a total of 6 comments that have been left impressed by the gift card offer.
It is pretty hard to figure out why Priya, Debbie and Janie (and the other three), none of which look even remotely Pakistani, would be happy with vouchers in Pakistani Rupees.
Scams predate the internet by a long shot, but it is the internet that made scamming a much easier process. It is easy to trick a person on the web on the pretext of offering them money, gift cards, vouchers and what not. It doesn’t even cost a lot to do this. Perhaps that is why such scams have become so common everywhere.
How to Watch Out for Scams on the Internet
We would recommend our readers to stay away from websites like these. Almost all of the websites promising you free stuff for almost no effort (or money) in return are scams. However, you can still watch for these red flags to make you decide better,
“If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
- Design: If the website is haphazardly designed with a weird UI, logos all over the place and is just messy overall, it is probably a fake website. Scammers are notoriously lazy and while there are some who would try their best to fool you, most of them are just too lazy to put in any real effort.
- Grammar: Along with a bout of laziness, scammers are also prone to make bad grammar/spelling mistakes. Sometimes, it is so obvious, it’s almost laughable.
- Details: If a website requires too much of your data, there is probably something fishy going around. Apart from the crop of famous social networking websites, try not to provide more data than you seem reasonable to anyone, anywhere.
- Reviews and Feedback: If the reviews or comments seem too overwhelmingly positive (or are too less), that is one big red flag.
- No Copyright or About Section: It is not possible for a company to have a website and not have an easily accessible Copyright claim and About Sections.
This stuff was started by foodpanda. They bought the brand name domains of famous restaurants and then use them for lead generation. Similar tactics are now being used by Deals websites :)
Deceptive Site!
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