Barefoot Cellars Giving Away Wine on Facebook-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
To commemorate its 50th anniversary, Barefoot Cellars is giving away free cases of wine on Facebook.
The Truth:
Barefoot Cellars isn’t giving away free cases of wine to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary.
That rumor went viral in October 2015 when a rogue website that looks similar to Barefoot Cellars’ Facebook page claimed that the company was giving away 230 cases of wine.
Users were told to “share” the page on Facebook in order to qualify for the offer. After sharing the page, the scam’s “marks” will be asked to provide their age, address and other personal information in order to receive their free case of Barefoot wine.
Don’t be fooled — this is a scam.
Barefoot Cellars released a statement shooting down rumors that it was giving away free cases of wine on its website:
While we at Barefoot Wine love free things, especially in the name of fun, we are NOT giving away free wine. That offer that you may have seen is a scam by an unknown party circulating the Internet.
We LOVE our fans and we are so sorry that you have been targeted.
It’s always helpful when a company directly shoots down a scam like this. But, even if Barefoot Cellars hadn’t spoken out about it, there were a few giveaways that the wine giveaway wasn’t a valid offer.
The first giveaway is that Barefoot Cellars is not celebrating its 50th anniversary. The brand was founded in 1985 and was sold to E&J Gallo in 2005 — so it was celebrating its 30th anniversary when the rumor went viral, not its 50th.
The second giveaway is that the address of the rogue website that started the Barefoot wine giveaway rumor is different than the company’s official website. Also, the offer appears nowhere on the brand’s official Facebook page.
Click here for more information on clickbait scams like this one.