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| - What was claimed
Alton Towers is offering free complimentary passes to users who follow a link to claim the tickets or comment on and share the posts.
Our verdict
The pages posting these offers are not associated with Alton Towers.
Alton Towers is offering free complimentary passes to users who follow a link to claim the tickets or comment on and share the posts.
The pages posting these offers are not associated with Alton Towers.
Multiple posts on Facebook are promoting offers for free tickets to Alton Towers, but they are not associated with the theme park and there is no evidence the offers are real.
The posts appear on two different pages, both called ‘Alton Towers Fans’, and are written as if they were posted by an official account for the theme park.
Several posts say that a user can win complimentary passes into the park by sharing or commenting on the posts. One post, which has almost 3,500 shares, says: “Here at Alton Towers we wanted to show you how much we care as we know times haven't been the easiest this year so we have decided that everybody who has $hared&¢ommented in the 7 day time frame from now will be given a complimentary coupon sheet with 8 passes.”
Others say that users can claim the free tickets by clicking on a link to “follow the quick simple details”. The follow-through page is a reward website rather than a page with an official Alton Towers website address.
A spokesperson for Alton Towers told Full Fact that the Facebook pages sharing the posts “are not associated to Alton Towers Resort [sic].”
The separate pages both posted offers with identical wording and photos on 15 June.
One of the pages is listed as a fan page, but the other says it’s an “amusement & theme park” page. The pages have fewer than 5,000 followers, compared to the official Alton Towers Facebook page which has more than 1.3 million followers.
Full Fact has written about fake offers and promotions many times before, including another fake Alton Towers giveaway we fact checked recently. This also includes free holidays at Center Parcs, free meals at restaurant chain Toby Carvery and Harvester and fake motorhome giveaways, among others.
It is always worth checking posts that claim to be offering deals that seem too good to be true. One way to be sure is by looking to see whether the offer has been shared by the company’s official page—this will often have more followers, a verified blue tick and a longer post history.
Image courtesy of Paul Harrop
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because Alton Towers has said the pages are not associated with the theme park.
Full Fact fights for good, reliable information in the media, online, and in politics.
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