The goal of this blog series is to factually prove or disprove rumors, myths and misconceptions in the Disney-verse. Tonight we are revisiting a topic we covered a while back because people keep asking us for the link to it. Please feel free to link friends and family to this article when you see them posting scammy contest links!
You Can Win A Disney Trip
We are revisiting this topic because there has recently been a rash of fake Disney contests online as well as people being scammed when buying tickets from other guests.
This myth really is more of a PSA warning that we hope will help you protect your personal information. Way to often I see my Disney friend’s sharing posts about winning tickets and free trips to the parks or a free cruise thanks to online “Disney” run Facebook contests. These posts show up on Facebook accounts that are only a few months old and only post about their giveaway, have about 1/10 the followers that the actual parks pages have and they use the same profile picture as the actual Disney Parks and Disney Cruise Line pages. You will also see things like “Disneyland. is giving away a Disney Cruise Line Cruise” and “DisneyWorld is giving away a DisneyCruise”. The best part is that when you click on these page’s “entry” urls instead of redirecting to a Disney owned website you end up at some weird url asking you to sign up for accounts, refer X many people and they tell you you can get bonus entries for sharing the contest on Facebook. These contests are in fact scams. Sadly the people who run these sites are using your trust and faith in Disney for their own personal benefit and in the process phish your personal information!
Here are some things to remember when entering Disney run contests are that they rarely offer any type of contest where the entry form is on a web site that doesn’t end in “disney.go.com”. This is because Go.com (or the The Go Network) is Disney’s landing page. Also, the people who Disney employees in their social networking department know their stuff! For example in the case of a Walt Disney World giveaway the CM’s in that department know that creating a new Facebook account solely to give away tickets makes no sense. Why would you create a new page in hopes people would find it and follow it, when the existing Walt Disney World Facebook account has over 15,000,000 followers?
The way to tell if a page “Giving away Disney Tickets” or a “Disney Trip” is a scam is simple! If you see a Facebook page offering a Disney Parks or Cruise Line give away that doesn’t direct you to a Disney owned webpage or doesn’t have Facebook’s blue verified logo beside their name, it’s probably a scam. If the page is named “Disneyland.” “DisneyWorld.” “Disney.Aulani” or anything other variation of words and punctuation, it’s probably a scam. If the page is only months old and carries a Disney Parks or Resort name it is a scam. All of Disney’s Facebook accounts were created years ago, some spanning back to 2009. The most important thing to remember Disneyland doesn’t host giveaways for Walt Disney World and vice versa and the parks don’t host giveaways on Facebook etc. in part because Disney uses their contests to build their marketing list but also because Facebook is very particular about how giveaways are done on their system. Below is a graphic we have used on TMSM to help people find “scammy” Disney give aways. Hopefully it helps you! Also you come across one of these pages please take a moment to report it to Facebook as a scam and feel free to share this article or the graphic above on the scam pages walls in hopes of helping keep others from giving their personal information to scammers!
The other scam we want you to know about involves individuals reselling tickets. Recently the LA Police have started warning residents about individuals reselling Disneyland tickets on Craigslist at “low low prices”. These sellers only take cash, and require the buyers to meet them in Downtown LA. He will show his license to people when asked as some sort of “proof of legitimacy”, the problem though is the tickets are fake and the only way to tell is by scanning them at the parks. Please remember activated tickets are not suppose to be resold to others, and you should ONLY buy tickets through Authorized Disney Ticket Sellers.
Remember my friends, if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. And this makes those great prizes offered by “Disneyland.” and “Disney.World” as being BUSTED!
If you would like to share the alert we put out last week about the “Cruise Scam” or the “Crates of Swag” scam on TMSM’s Facebook feel free!
Michele Atwood is the Owner/Editor of The Main Street Mouse and its subsidiaries. Co owner of the House of Mouse Expo & Lost Princess Apparel. Author of the books “Moving to Main Street U.S.A.” “How Many Sleeps Till Disney?” and “How Many Sleeps Till Disneyland?” Michele also contributes theme park news for Fox 35 Orlando 11pm news and on the radio on WDBO.
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