Shortly after Heart Evangelista announced she is giving away electronic tablets to help students with online classes, netizens pretending to be affiliated with the actress duped readers into joining bogus raffles.
The spurious posts, uploaded June 7 and 8, bore several elements that raise red flags on the legitimacy of the posts.
First, they were published by at least two different Facebook netizens both named “Jess” and described themselves as “volunteer staff” of Evangelista.
One account appears to have been newly created; the first public post was published only on May 28, although this person claims to be a “staff assistant” of the actress since “June 8, 2019.” The other account has almost 8,000 followers and has several posts about supposedly giving away free iPhones.
Second, both posts instructed those interested to “win” tablets to register via links shown in the posts, and to leave as many comments as possible for a “higher chance of winning.” The link in the June 7 post leads to a game of online shopping website Lazada called Share Pocket, which encourages users to invite friends to install the Lazada mobile application.
The June 8 post, on the other hand, asks netizens to join the FB group LOYALTY FLEX to “automatically” list their names in the faux raffle. Upon review, the group appears to host similar bogus giveaways.
Evangelista has not posted any such raffle-style mechanics for her giveaway. Her tweet on June 4 said netizens only need to send her a direct message on Instagram if they are interested in getting a tablet from her.
Evangelista asks the same from netizens with ailments who need financial support, as shown in these tweets.
Both of the sham raffles seemed to have taken off from a now-deleted post of an impostor FB account of game show host Willie Revillame. The impostor also claimed to be volunteer-staff “Jess.” The link in its post, however, redirects to an online streaming site that scams people into giving their bank account details.
VERA Files reached out to Evangelista to confirm if a certain “Jess” is part of her staff but she has not responded as of this writing.
The pseudo raffles circulated online after the actress announced on her social media accounts that she will be giving away 550 tablets to students from the proceeds of the sale of her artwork.
The fraud posts have garnered 181,000 interactions and have been reposted for 366 times, according to social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle.
VERA has recently flagged a hoax raffle that uses celebrities like Revillame and Sen. Manny Pacquiao for the fake giveaways. (See VERA FILES FACT CHECK: FAKE Pacquiao, Revillame giveaways bait netizens again)
(Editor’s Note: VERA Files has partnered with Facebook to fight the spread of disinformation. Find out more about this partnership and our methodology.)
