Is Ellen DeGeneres giving away gift cards, cash, a car or a home to people for liking and sharing a Facebook post and then leaving a comment? No, that's not true: in recent days several fake Ellen Facebook pages and profiles were created that are being used by scammers to harvest likes, shares and comments to make their pages or profiles appear more popular in Facebook's algorithm. Some of the pages are also being used to spread dodgy links to suspicious websites.
An example of the scam can be seen in this post (archived here). Many of the posts have a variation of following text:
Hello Every Body, I will randomly select people on Facebook, everyone who * shares * will receive a gift card, cash, and a big winner can win a car & home "Share now" don't miss! We are watching !!! I will choose 900 lucky people. $ 90,000,000 each only follows instructions ...
Step 1 - like
Step 2 - Share
Step 3 - Comment--'done''
Most of the scam pages use short video clips of the real Ellen, often totally unrelated to any giveaway or contest.
The real Ellen DeGeneres Facebook page can be found here:
Ellen DeGeneres
Ellen DeGeneres. 31M likes. Welcome to my page! I'm a comedian, an animal lover and a talk show host. Which means I tell jokes about cats to celebrities. Check out ellentube.com for more!
If you see an Ellen contest or giveaway on Facebook and it isn't coming from that page it is most likely fake. You should also keep an eye out for the blue verification checkmark next to the name of the page or profile: if that is missing it means it is not the real page.
