Freebie Airlines

Fake accounts of American, international and Russian airlines promised free tickets to the first few thousand followers on Instagram. The divorce reached Mother Russia only three months later, but the native scammers turned out to be a little more greedy for followers, and the Russians were more trusting.

Today, a parade of freebie lovers took place on Russian Instagram. Thousands of people fell for the promises of several air carriers to give a ticket for a post with a link to their account and one of the advertising hashtags.

We found similar promotions from three companies: Aeroflot (which recently caused a scandal with the dismissal of a flight attendant ), S7 and Emirates. All three promotions are structured the same way: for posting a screenshot with a link to the company account and one of the hashtags, free tickets were promised to the first 20 thousand subscribers (for S7 only 5 thousand). The most important thing is no reference to the rules of the competition or at least some evidence of officiality.

Naturally, all three actions are a complete, total, hopeless fake, deception, scam and mockery. However, about 2200+ photos were published using the Aeroflot hashtag #loveaeroflot, and 1700+ posts using #s7promo. The fake account @aeroflotairlines has already received more than 4 thousand subscribers (as of the time of publication of this leak), while the real account @aeroflot has about 3 thousand. The already deleted account @s7airlinesru managed to earn about one and a half thousand subscribers, but S7 does not have an official account.

Most of all, Russians fell for free tickets to Dubai, the world capital of luxury and chic, where it is currently +25 °C. There are 27+ thousand photos using the hashtag #emiratespromotion, and they attracted much more followers.

For this purpose, the fake account @emiratesdubai1 (already deleted) was used. Emirates does not have an official Instagram account, but there are pages on Google+ and Facebook . At the latter, yesterday they announced their official channels - apparently, they had to do this precisely because of fakes.

Some Instagram users made creative use of the general hysteria.

It turned out that the S7 spam was started by a certain Nazar Kotentsov . A screenshot of his explanatory post was posted on Habré . Judging by the number of comments and the fact that the @kotentsov account has already been deleted, the crowd still lynched Nazar using the “Report spam” button.

A moment of history. In November 2012, a campaign similar to this spontaneously broke out in the United States. Then four major air carriers promised free tickets - Jet Blue, American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines. True, the American scammers were more moderate in their promises: American Airlines were going to give free tickets only to the first 5 thousand subscribers, and Delta Airlines - to 15 thousand.

warned users about the scam CNet . They turned to Instagram representatives for comment, but they never deigned to respond, but simply silently deleted all the fake accounts. But Jet Blue dispelled users’ doubts by officially denying information about the promotion.

JetBlue does not have an official @ instagram account. Any accounts or promotions you may currently see there are not ours.

— JetBlue Airways (@JetBlue) November 4, 2012

Aeroflot only responds to requests from users.

@ i_maikl Aeroflot official Instagram account - instagram.com/aeroflot

— Aeroflot (@aeroflot) January 30, 2013

It is still unclear what exactly served as the motive for creating such fake campaigns. The creators of the accounts did not redirect the traffic anywhere and, of course, understood that sooner or later they would be banned, which means they would not be able to take advantage of the newly acquired followers. The most important thing is that this is a big headache for air carriers, because all dissatisfied users will contact them with complaints and, even after explanations, will continue to blame the company, not the spammers.

At least, spammers have found out that this competition model—posting a photo with a link to an account and a hashtag—really works: people pick up the competition virally, and followers increase. I bet would-be SMMers will adopt this method.

UPDATE: Looks like this can't be stopped. Russian Railways promise tickets for Sapsan, the St. Petersburg metro - free travel tokens, and the Ministry of Defense - military tickets from the military registration and enlistment office.

Also, our reader @webix seems to have figured out where this all started. According to him, back in September 2012, such promotions for the distribution of iPhones appeared (and there were several of them).

Whoever hasn't seen this spam in his feed, let him be the first to throw a stone at me,
Nikita Likhachev,
The Twi Journal

#Scandal #Instagram #fakes #scandals #spam #Aeroflot #S7_Airlines #Emirates #Russian Railways