If you’ve suddenly started receiving messages about online competitions and giveaways from one of your close online friends, the offers might not be legitimate. Scammers have gone beyond creating fake profiles and started hacking into real accounts, taking advantage of existing relationships and friends lists to spread the “close friends scam” to a wider audience.
Take a look at how to spot a fake giveaway and avoid the close friends scam.
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How Scammers Steal Accounts for Close Friends Scam
No matter how careful you are with your own passwords and online security, you can’t control what your friends do. If you have extensive friends lists on Facebook, Instagram, Discord, or TikTok, one or more of the accounts you interact with could eventually be compromised. This might be because they’ve accidentally downloaded malware, fallen for a phishing attack themselves, had an authenticated session stolen, or had a frequently used password stolen.
One report from Bitdefender in July 2026 suggested that the number of hacked accounts had doubled in the space of a month, with scammers using these accounts to send fake giveaways, cryptocurrency scams, casino promotions, and phishing links.
Because the recipients are getting these messages from their close friends, they’re much less likely to consider the possibility that the giveaway could be a scam.
How to Spot a Fake Giveaway
Of course, some giveaways could be real, and you don’t want to miss out on a great prize. Here are some of the signs that a giveaway is almost certainly fake and part of the close friends scam:
- They give you a very limited time window, e.g., “Enter the draw in the next ten minutes or miss out!”
- You have to give your social media account login details more than once – it may look like a real login page, prompting you to think your app has crashed or glitched, but this is a technique many scammers use to gain access to accounts.
- The message from your friend doesn’t match their usual way of speaking or typing.
- The giveaway doesn’t appear on the brand’s official website.
A solid piece of advice is to only enter giveaways via a brand’s website, and avoid giveaways that demand processing fees or pressure you into giving account details or irrelevant personal information.
Keep Yourself Safe From Social Media Scams
A good way to of how to spot a fake giveaway is check if a friend’s social media account has been hacked is by calling them on the phone or dropping them a message via another platform. Screenshot the offending posts or messages about the giveaway and ask if they’re genuine. If it’s not, your friend can change their password and activate two-factor authentication (2FA), being sure to end any live sessions on any other devices. You can usually find these by heading to the privacy and security settings on the social platform and searching for permissions or “Your Devices.”
You can stay updated on the latest social media scams by signing up for Scam Detector’s Scam Alerts. The more you know, the safer you can stay online.
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When my sweet old grandmother got caught up in an Amazon gift card scam, I decided then and there that I needed to do whatever I could to inform as many people as possible about the grifters of the world. That’s what I do here – writing about modern scams so you don’t get caught out.
