If you've been active on Facebook in June, you might have seen promotional offers claiming to give away an Aldi gift card worth “$100 off with a minimum $120 purchase.” The offer appears to be coming from Aldi – at least in the sense of sporting Aldi's logo – but it's a fake: there's no gift card and no connection with Aldi, either.
Instead, it's just a piece of bait seeking to lure you into a “survey scam” – to get that free gift card, “all” you have to do is fill out a survey whose questions ask for all sorts of personal information, including your street address, email address, telephone number and birthdate.
When you finish answering these questions, do you get your gift card? Nope! Next, you're asked to sign up for either a paid subscription offer or even a new credit card. You never will get the $100 coupon — but you can probably expect to see some new charges on your credit card.
Elements of "like-farming"
This Aldi-based survey scam also includes elements of like-farming — the Facebook scam that urges people to “like,” “share” and/or comment upon a particular post in order to drive up the page's popularity ranking, which in turn makes the scam content more likely to appear on other people's Facebook feeds.
The Aldi survey scam says that you must “Complete these 2 simple steps below to get Your [sic] $100 ALDI Coupon!” Step one: Share on Facebook. Step two: “Add a comment below, for example: 'Thanks!' to get Your Coupon!”
But as Snopes.com notes in a recent post debunking the new urban legend that Aldi is giving away hundred-dollar gift cards on Facebook, “Once the steps are completed, however, users are not greeted with information explaining how to claim their coupons. Instead, they're asked to take a brief survey that entails providing personal information … and are required to sign up for credit cards or enroll in [a] number of subscription programs in order to obtain their "free" gift cards.”
"If it sounds too good to be true, it is"
The sign-up process also includes stupid-in-context space-filler questions such as “Do you like to shop at Aldi?” (it's a yes-or-no question).
Even if you're not familiar with like-farming or survey scams, you should always bear in mind two basic anti-scam rules: “If it sounds too good to be true, it is” and “Don't trust any 'free' offers that demand your credit card number first.” Even if that Aldi survey scam didn't ask for your credit card information or sell you paid subscriptions, the idea that you could get $100 worth of free groceries in exchange for just a few seconds' worth of link-clicking sounds too good to be true — because it's nothing but a scam.