FAKE NEWS: Nescafe is NOT giving away free coffee machines for testers

[UPDATE 4/7/2019 20:02]: A Nestle Malaysia spokesperson has responded with a statement.

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You may have received a message through social media (likely via WhatsApp) about Nescafe running a giveaway where you can win a brand new Nescafe Dolce Gusto coffee machine. But, as you can probably tell by the title of this story: It’s fake news. Super fake.

The message starts out like any other fake message:

“Nescafe offers free coffee makers for testers” plus a legit-looking URL. Then, when you click through, you’ll be greeted with an almost legit-looking website and a pop-up that asks you to click yes if you want to win a free coffee machine:

Scroll down, and you’ll find a short questionnaire that’ll ask you three questions and once that’s done, it’ll ask you to share it with 5 groups or contacts via WhatsApp to fill up the bar to get a free coffee machine plus three packs of coffee. They even included fake Facebook comments to try and sell how legit this giveaway is.

But, if you’ve been paying attention to the website so far, you may have noticed a couple of red flags. Firstly, the URL we received, while it looks legit at a glance, if you look a little closer you’ll see that it’s actually a .corn (which, by the way, isn’t even its domain name):

Then, you’ve got the fact that the image at the top is a super duper low-res photo that no multinational company would ever use as a header for a microsite.

Website TheQuint even reached out to Nestle India to verify whether or not this giveaway is real, and their response was a flat out no. We have also reached out to Nestle Malaysia, and will publish their response as soon as they give us one, but the signs definitely point to a fake giveaway.

So, if you receive this message via WhatsApp, please don’t click on it and definitely don’t share it with your friends.

[UPDATE 4/7/2019 20:02]: A Nestle Malaysia spokesperson has responded with a statement.

“Thank you for highlighting this – we’ve been notified that this has been circulating too and it’s certainly a scam. As per our usual practice when these incidences occur, we have reported this scam site to the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission.”

[VIA]