A Facebook page pretending to be owned by the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) has been posting announcements of fake raffle draws.
On June 5, the four-month old page PCSO Jackpot Balita urged netizens to join a fabricated raffle, promising winners a house and lot, and cash prizes as much as a million pesos.
It uploaded an image of a house with the caption:
“DAHIL SA PATULOY NA PAG-ASENSO NATIN, MAGKAKAROON TAYO NG RAFFLE DRAW (Because of our [PCSO] growth, we will have a raffle draw).”
The raffle draw is made up.
Aside from being an impostor site, mimicking PCSO’s official Facebook page, a reverse image search shows the photo of the house has existed as early as 2012, and was just recently used in a page of a Pakistan-based housing cooperative.
PCSO had already released a statement last June 2018 regarding this modus operandi. They named ‘Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office’ as their only and official Facebook account.
The recent hoax could have reached over 24 million people.
(Editor’s Note: VERA Files has partnered with Facebook to fight the spread of disinformation. Find out more about this partnership and our methodology.)
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