Hundreds of Facebook users share fake Argos giveaway

Several Facebook posts shared in local community groups are falsely promoting an Argos giveaway that is not real. 

The posts, which have identical text, claim: “Argos is giving Gifts of smartphones, laptops other miscellaneous things at no charge mailed straight to your doorstep [sic]”. It says people can arrange the delivery by completing a “short 20 second form on the next page”.

A spokesperson for Argos confirmed to Full Fact that the offer is not genuine. 

One post appearing in a community group for Liverpool has almost 300 shares, while another post in a group for Mayobridge in Northern Ireland has more than 220 shares. It also appears in groups for Knock Shrine in Ireland, Worthing and Lancing in West Sussex and Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, as well as Miramichi in Canada. 

The posts include two links directing users to the same external website that does not resemble the official Argos site and has no further mention of a giveaway. The page promotes a £75 Argos Gift Card and links to a reward website.

The posts all share a collage of photos including a stock image of people queuing outside an Argos in Croydon, south London, during the pandemic and a photo from a 2014 article showing employees outside a store in Feltham, west London.

Moreover, the edit history on these posts shows that they used to be appeals for help in finding a supposedly missing person, and have since been changed to promote this fake Argos offer. 

Full Fact has written about missing people hoax posts many times before, and have recently published an investigation into how and why they’re shared so widely. 

We’ve also written about many fake Argos giveaways before, along with offers from other retailers including at Wilko and Amazon. 

A useful way of checking whether a deal is real is by seeing if it appears on a company’s official page, which tends to have more followers, a verified blue tick on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and a long post history. 

If an online offer sounds too good to be genuine, there’s a high chance that it isn’t. 

Image courtesy of Mtaylor848