When you’re about to follow a company on your social media site of choice or share an image or status in the hopes of receiving free stuff, stop. Apply critical thinking. Is it likely that an airline will give free flight passes to twenty thousand of its Instagram followers? Twenty, maybe, but not twenty thousand.

That brings us to the sad tale of the fake Virgin Atlantic Instagram account. We can’t link to it because the account has now been taken down, but its legacy is still with us in the form of this post on the real airline’s real Instagram account.

What’s the value of twenty thousand Instagram followers who have subscribed to see something that you can’t give them? One common scheme is to collect “likes” or followers and then sell the account to someone else, who could use the account for good or evil. The important thing is that the person who gathered followers under false pretenses is selling you.

While we don’t know that the people behind this account were part of a like-farming scheme, we do know that they were imitating a well-known brand. Still, followers probably should have known better. The account had zero followers, and promised free tickets for Virgin’s airline in the United States despite being called “Virgin_UK.”

Why thousands of people are following this fake Virgin Airlines Instagram account [PandoDaily]

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