Perhaps one of your Facebook friends recently invited you to become a fan of IKEA.com, an enticement that offered a $1,000 gift card for pledging social media allegiance to the Swedish superstore. Naturally, overcome by visions of a shopping spree in an enormous blue warehouse, you tore through the registration process with reckless abandon, invited all of your FB friends to become fans pronto, and actually gave IKEA all of your contact info. Now you’re waiting for the mail to deliver an E-ZPass to the Hagalund, Grimstad and Lyckhem you’ve always wanted and that’ll leave you enough store credit to pick up even more oddly-named home furnishings.
Expect to be waiting forever to receive that gift card; Facebook and IKEA reps tell Daily Intel the offer is a hoax. The good news: You won’t be wasting untold hours assembling a piece of furniture while trying to decipher those puzzling stick-figure instructions.
Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes says that the IKEA gift card offer “has been identified as a scam and was taken offline promptly.” But moments ago we were able to advance through every step of the registration process, stopping short of entering our home address.
IKEA spokesperson Mona Astra Liss says the company became aware of the issue on March 8. “It’s created a lot of noise because it’s gone global.” Liss says. “Apparently, it was a big problem in Finland.” Liss says her 23-year-old son got an invite on Facebook and called her to check it the offer was legit. Liss says the “false offer” is not some half-baked publicity stunt by IKEA. “It’s absolutely not a publicity stunt and absolutely not endorsed by IKEA,” she says. She adds that Facebook performs closed investigations of scams, so IKEA doesn’t know who’s behind the hoax.
Noys says that Facebook has acted independently to thwart the scam and that Facebook doesn’t publicly discuss its investigations into scams perpetrated through its site. If you got duped by the hoax and are still determined to become a fan of the real IKEA Facebook page, go here. But seriously, why would anyone want to do that if you’re not going to get a $1,000 gift card?
