Wow, that's unfortunate. Thank god I didn't get one.

I'd like to know why people bother faking these. The scammers get no monetary gain. I would assume they're set up so that they get no personal information. And, the scammed individual loses nothing except their time and effort ( and, if they're printable, a piece of their paper ). So, why do people bother faking these? Any ideas?

@Nascar24Dude: So that Wendys loses out on some money. Face it, there's gotta be some cashiers somewhere that will and have taken this coupon.

My bet is a former disgruntled employee.

@Nascar24Dude: I think it's akin to mountain-climbing -- except for jerkfaces. They can't even participate in their crappy prank. I wonder if they just snicker in their hovels all night.

Allstate Wendy's shareholders? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

@Nascar24Dude: Because they're assholes. This is fun for them.

@Nascar24Dude: For the lulz, one assumes.

these kinds of coupons are all over the internet for free. they work too. this is the first i've heard of these kind of coupons not working, but i've mostly just seen its subway/citibank version.

@Nascar24Dude: When I was in high school and worked at a fast food/ice cream place, we'd get fake coupons all of the time. People would make coupon books on their computers and sell them w/o authorization from businesses. By the time someone went to redeem a coupon, they'd already lost their money and the counterfeiter was long gone.

In this case, though, I'd have to agree with the "disgruntled former employee" theory.

@Nascar24Dude: Because people have nothing better to do with their time.

@Nascar24Dude: There are times they do work.

For example, my friend faked up a bunch of "$10 off any Xbox 360 Game or Accessory" coupons for Target. He combined that with a 1600 MSP cards for $15 sale and got $400 worth of Microsoft points for $100.

I imagine the employee who took them and the manager who did the overrride got fired for that.

Glad I don't eat meat.

@Keavy_Rain: Did he buy them all at once? Anyone would be stupid to accept a ton of the same coupons from a single person that are not scannable.

And if he went in and out a dozen times, it would have been kinda suspicious. And with the volume of video evidence I would expect an easy arrest.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): Lulz is a good reason to do anything.

It's being reported that this is not the first time these coupons have appeared on the Internet. Must have been a successful promotion.

reminds me of high school. back in Freshman year they had an issue with the upperclassmen selling tickets to the rally. Rally admission was free

BTW, I've stopped visiting Snopes, and would encourage others to also stop and not link to it anymore.

They've gone WAY overboard with their hijinks. First off, they apparently don't believe in fair use of THEIR copyrighted material, even though they take full advantage of fair use for themselves. In fact, one version of their T&Cs said that The Consumerist was liable for some thousands of dollars simply for quoting part of an article in fair use! They also go to great lengths to stop people from quoting parts of their articles, such as attempting to disable right-clicks, highlighting text, etc.

Of course, you can't find the terms on their page anymore, and they've blocked themselves from the Wayback Machine, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

And to top it all off, I just got not one but TWO pop-up ads visiting the site.

This is old. I tried to use this same coupon about 3 years ago...FAIL>

@Karl: Didn't know about the T&C, but yeah, the pop-ups are really annoying.

@I Love New Jersey: Glad I don't have anything meaningful to contribute.

It's a fake!

@Karl: "I have this super dramatic claim about how a website said something, and yet I can't be bothered to cite my sources! Instead, I'll say the bad guys made all the evidence impossible to access! Why, no one would ever think to question my word!"

...good luck with that one?

As an aside, I have no affiliation with Snopes, I just think you're being a little silly. And not the funny sort of silly, either.

@Nascar24Dude:

I would put my money on email address validation: You can use an unique HTML link for loading an image embedded in the email.

When you load the coupon's image from the server, the unique code for that specific URL is logged, matched with the email address that corresponds, and the sender knows there is a live person at the other end.

A qualified email address list is FAR more valuable to spammers that an blind, unqualified one. It can be resold for a whole lot more $.

Since spamming cost nothing to these guys - unless they get caught - it's a common practice to boost revenues.

@christoj879: I am waiting for coupons for cake. Or maybe delicious soup?

Wendy's may be one of the best of fast food burgers (vs salt and fat, etc) but that doesn't make it good for you. Part of the cancer destroying America, some would say.

I was given some fake coupons by a well-meaning person who admitted they were scanned and faked but that they were 'worth a try!'. No, it's not worth my time at all, since I have to live with myelf.

@Ptath:

Sorry.

The coupon for cake is a lie.

@AppleAlex:

I went to a rather weird small combined middle-high school (7-12 grade) located in an old multistory office building without any elevator service. The middle school was combined for the whole district, but we had two high schools with one being larger than the other. Our high school was the smaller HS. This meant we had a lot more middle school students at the school, with a Senior Class of only about a dozen students.

One of the Seniors convinced his 7th grade sibling that it was the honor of the youngest class in the school to carry the books of the Senior class.

The parental unit of the Senior student backed this joke and even reinforced the joke with other 7th grage parental units. Our HS Principal thought it was the best practical joke he had ever heard. Our HS teachers knew about the joke.

Every Senior had 3 or more 7th grade students assigned to them for the purpose of carrying books from floor to floor from locker to locker for the Senior.

The Middle School Principal blew the whistle on the joke after the MS teachers complained about the number of students who were repeated late to class.

I almost got expelled.

I had this recently passed onto me by my sister-in-law. She was so excited to share it when she talked to me over the phone. Then I saw the coupon image and my heart just sank. She had sent it to a lot of people and she's really really trying to find good deals and she seemed really proud. I didn't have the heart to tell her that it was a fake (I'd ran across it several years back) so I ended up forwarding a link.

Plus, it's so funny the scammer didn't even bother to change the copyright date. Shame it's not big enough to notice.

Don't you love when it's the other way around, where a company (e.g. Taco Bell) makes an internet coupon and the employee working at a certain Taco Bell humiliates you in front of other customers saying it's fake?

Yeah... I still have a gripe with Taco Bell with that. At least calling corporate got me some free food for my humiliation.

@Karl: Considering how often and how frequently that site gets ripped off by writers too lazy to do their own legwork, the precautions disabling right-clicks/highlighting make a lot of sense.

As for the pop-up ads... I keep forgetting that all content on the internet is supposed to be 100% free and not supported by ads.

@Nascar24Dude: You don't see the benefit to competitors like McRotten's or Booger King in making fakes to discredit Wendy's? It wouldn't surprise me if another fast food chain (of any size) were responsible.

Or, it may have been done by someone to hurt Wendy's image. Dave Thomas was infamous for his anti-gay stance and donation to gay-hating causes (e.g. pulling ads from Ellen Degeneres' show). Yet since his death, the fast "food" chain has enacted a "non-discrimination policy" toward gays/lesbians/bisexuals/transgendered and the "Dave Thomas foundation for adoption" takes the view that gay parent families are healthy for adopted children. (Somehow I doubt this was Thomas' own view, more likely the CEOs who took over.)

[www.davethomasfoundation.org]

If I were to bet on who would resort to faking coupons to hurt the corporation, I'd bet on the gay-haters doing it rather than gays.

@Philthadelphian: Disabling right-clicks, etc. does almost nothing to slow down the determined copyright infringer, but makes it difficult for the casual user to grab a fair use clip. It's an aggressive tactic that says "I will dictate how you use your own computer/web browser and inconveniences the honest and/or less technically literate members of the population.

My problem with the pop-ups (which I never see due to blockers) is that they've included ads for some pretty shady sites (The dubious anti-spyware/virus apps etc.) It makes it very hard to refer the site to someone who just emailed me about how Bill Gates will pay me a nickel for each time I forward an email, knowing the sender may fall for the advertised scams as well.

I once worked for a printing company which had, among other jobs, the task of making free drink coupons for a major restaurant chain. It was a legit contract authorized by all parties. There were safeguards in place to keep things authentic.

The printing staff did make a few extra coupons for themselves but mainly because it was exciting to feel like they were getting away with something. Only one or two of them were ever used.

The free drink in question was pretty bad and quickly failed in the marketplace. Even giving them away couldn't make it a hit.

I get 8% off my GEICO insurance because I am a shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway.

If a company does have a shareholder appreciation program, I would rather get cash back than meals, miles, etc.

Not even a good fake. It's an old coupon in which they changed the "Valid through" date. It says 2006 on the bottom. I can't stand lazy people.

What's even worse is when a company itself issues a coupon and then when you take the coupon in to redeem it, the stores say they don't honor it. That's happened to me in the past year with KFC and Baskin Robbins.