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Watch out for the viral message about the Toyota 80th Anniversary Celebration and the giveaway of a Toyota Corolla!
Find out why it is a SCAM, and please alert your family and friends!
Scam Alert : Toyota 80th Anniversary Celebration!
This is the link that has gone viral on WhatsApp, claiming to offer you a chance to win a Toyota Corolla during the Toyota 80th Anniversary Celebration!
It’s just a scam, so we added that overlay to prevent it from being further abused.
Please DO NOT CLICK on the link, or proceed with the “contest”.
Why Toyota 80th Anniversary Celebration Contest Is A Scam!
For those of you who are wondering – how do you know it’s a scam, here are the facts…
Fact #1 : The Link Is Not Legitimate
If you look at the URL – the link – it goes to http://1s7wttd.nodxteh.cn.
It is obviously not a Toyota-related link, but an unrelated Chinese-registered (.cn) domain.
A real Toyota campaign would use the official Toyota website or Facebook / Twitter page, not a Chinese domain with å weird, random link.
In addition, it is not an SSL-encrypted link, which would start with https://. While not a hallmark of a scam link, legitimate websites will use SSL-encrypted links (with https, not http)
When you see such links, DO NOT CLICK on them.
Fact #2 : Toyota’s 80th Anniversary Was In 2017
Toyota was established on 28 August 1937. They celebrated their 80th anniversary in 2017, and will be 85 years old in 2022.
This is not only a scam, it’s an old scam – it probably started in 2017 and has been refreshed every few months for the last 5 years!
Here was the official 28 August 2017 tweet by the Toyota Motor Corp.
Happy Birthday 🎂 #Toyota! 80 years and counting. Celebrating with a big THANK YOU to everyone who helps to make it possible every day. pic.twitter.com/DjKeAOGTCX
— Toyota Motor Corp. (@ToyotaMotorCorp) August 28, 2017
Fact #3 : Toyota Is In The Business Of Selling Cars
Toyota is in the business of SELLING CARS, not giving them away.
Why on Earth would they give away cars to celebrate their 80th anniversary? Think about that.
They are a business, not a charity! They may give you a special discount, or launch a special edition of a Toyota car, but they will NOT give anyone a free car.
Not surprisingly, they did NOT give away a single car when they celebrated their 80th anniversary in 2017!
Fact #4 : The Page Has So Many Troubling Clues
If you click on the link, you will be led to this page, claiming you will get a free gift with Toyota… and a chance to win a Toyota Corolla.
The page is full of grammatical mistakes – something an actual Toyota website would not have.
On top of that, why would Toyota give you a Corolla for answering simple questions like “Do you know Toyota?” Seriously…
And below that is a list of comments by people who claimed to have won the Toyota Corolla. Do you really believe that Toyota is giving away so many cars?
Try clicking on their names, and nothing happens. Nothing happens either if you click to Like. So where are the likes coming from?
They are all FAKE COMMENTS. If you check the code, you can see that both the comments and pictures were manually inserted.
Fact #5 : You Will Always Win The Car
You can try the contest any number of times, and you will ALWAYS win the car.
Why? Because the next step involves you sharing this with 5 groups or 20 friends on WhatsApp!
So no matter how many times you participate, you will ALWAYS win the free Toyota Corolla. Do you think that’s the case with a real contest?
This is a SCAM. DO NOT SHARE and do NOT proceed beyond this page.
Fact #6 : There Are Tons Of Similar Scams
This is not a unique scam, and it pays to understand that this is really a common online scam.
There are tons of similar “anniversary scams”, some of which I debunked earlier :
These “anniversary scams” keep cropping up because they are very lucrative for scammers.
No matter how many times they recycle the same scams, or create new variants, people keep falling for them!
So please SHARE this scam alert, and WARN your family and friends!
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Dr. Adrian Wong has been writing about tech and science since 1997, even publishing a book with Prentice Hall called Breaking Through The BIOS Barrier (ISBN 978-0131455368) while in medical school.
He continues to devote countless hours every day writing about tech, medicine and science, in his pursuit of facts in a post-truth world.
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