What was claimed
Amazon is selling off pallets loaded with uncollected DHL parcels for £2 each.
Our verdict
A spokesperson for Amazon said this deal is fake and not related to the company.
Amazon parcel giveaway is fake
Two Facebook posts are promoting a fake parcel giveaway. The posts claim that you can purchase a pallet loaded with uncollected Amazon parcels for £2 by following a link.
One of the posts, on a page called ‘Liquidation of a household goods warehouse’, says that the parcels are uncollected from DHL’s post offices. But a spokesperson for DHL told Full Fact: “To our knowledge this isn’t genuine”.
This post says that the parcels have been “sitting idle in Amazon warehouses” and specifies that the “online giant is selling them off” by the pallet-load. A spokesperson for Amazon said that the post is “definitely fake” and not related to the company.
The posts are each accompanied with photographs that show multiple pallets loaded with parcels outside an Amazon warehouse. The pallets closest to the camera have a £2 for-sale poster attached to them.
The Amazon spokesperson said that, while this deal is fake, the company does do large-scale product donations where parcels are loaded onto pallets in the same way as in the photos.
The page sharing the post describes itself both as the “official Facebook page” of Amazon UK and the warehouse of Amazon UK, but there are various clues to suggest this is not correct. For example, the page was only created on 15 February, has only shared one post and only has 66 followers. The official Amazon UK Facebook page has over 5.5 million followers.
A reverse image search also shows its profile picture has been taken from a Vox article about Amazon’s workforce in the US, and its cover photo is an image of a new Amazon warehouse in New York from the engineering firm TYLin’s website.
The other promotion appears on a page called ‘Offer of the week’ that was created on the same day as the post was shared, 16 February. It suggests that pallets may include a TV, phone, vacuum cleaner and kitchen appliances and that the items would otherwise be recycled.
Both posts link to a page that asks users to complete a survey for the opportunity to “win” a pallet, rather than purchase one for £2 as the posts state. While the website resembles Amazon, it does not have the official URL address.
Many of the accounts commenting in support of the parcel promotion also appear to be fake with no listed friends.
We have written previously about similar fake offers advertised on Facebook, including free televisions from Tesco and e-scooter promotions.
Image courtesy of Claudia Swartz
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because DHL and Amazon have confirmed that the post is not genuine.