No, Dollar General Isn’t Giving Away $60 Coupons

This particular scam has been around for awhile now in one form or another, but the latest one to show up all over my Facebook feed is about how Dollar General is giving away $60 coupons to celebrate its anniversary or something.

It's not.

Not only is the coupon you "win" a total fraud, but to get it you have to click through several survey questions before hitting a final screen that demands you share the offer on Facebook and Like the site behind the scam.

This is why you've probably been seeing it all over the place, because everyone who falls for it has to share the thing on Facebook before they get their fake "coupon", so the scammers can try to sucker in as many other people as possible.

If you do manage to click through everything and "win" (yes, it'll actually tell you that you've won this thing), the coupon you get will be worth slightly less than the paper and printer ink you used to print it out.

Then, while you're trying (and failing) to use the fake coupon at a Dollar General, all the personal information from your Facebook page is being data-mined and sold to who knows who. The next thing you know, your profile gets cloned and then your friends start getting weird requests that you need bail money, or that you're stranded on the side of the road in some unpronounceable village and need a quick infusion of cash to, I dunno, get new tires or something.

So, yeah. Don't click this thing when it pops up in your Facebook feed - and it will, because there's a sucker born every minute in the real world, and every .5 microseconds in the weird world of social media. Apparently.

Do, however, send this to any of your friends who fell for the scam. Let them know that it might be a good time to go review some of their Facebook settings, paying particular attention to any weird Apps they don't remember granting access to. (Log into Facebook, then go to Settings and click Apps from the menu on the left-hand side of the screen.)

Stop clicking these things, people.

If a store is giving away coupons, then the store will be giving away coupons, not some weird website you've never heard of. Bill Gates will never send you money, no amount of Likes or Shares will ever get anyone a new kidney, nobody is going to learn how fast a photo gets shared on the internet because you clicked that "teacher's" picture, everyone passes that IQ test that says no one can pass it, and everybody recognizes what that old thing from your childhood is. You don't need to Like and Share it.

Oh, and all of those "name tests" you take that are so much fun? Same thing.

Just stop.