LAUGFS Sri Lanka is not offering free gift vouchers for their 19th anniversary

There are plenty of online hoaxes being spread through social media platforms, especially through WhatsApp. At Fact Crescendo, we are always on the alert for such online frauds, including this post, which had started circulating through WhatsApp, claiming that LAUGFS Supermarket was giving away a voucher worth Rs. 10,000 for their 19^th anniversary celebration. These messages were being shared on Facebook as well. We did a fact check about the claim and found out that it is yet another hoax.

Source information:

Facebook Link | Archived Link

Many WhatsApp users sharing this link with the caption “LAUGFS 🇱🇰 වටිනා වවුචර ලබා දීම Rs 10,000 ඔබේ සැමරීමට 19 වන සංවත්සරය. මට මගේ නොමිලේ වවුචරය ලැබුණි

https://pressgift.info/laugfs “

Translated to English as below:

“LAUGFS Sri Lanka is giving away vouchers worth Rs 10,000 to celebrate their 19th anniversary. I received my free voucher https://pressgift.info/laugfs”

Fact Check

First, we observed that the link given along with the message did not belong to official Laugfs Holdings Pvt Ltd. When we clicked the link, it was redirected to a website resembling Laugfs Super

In that website, URL they used Laugfs Super logo and the design was more catered for the mobile view. In this a series of questions related to Laugfs Super customer satisfaction were posted.

1. Do you usually buy from our stores?
2. Are you satisfied with our services?
3. Do you recommend LAUGFS to your friends and family?

After answering, all above question below screenshot was displayed prompting users to share this message among 10 friends or groups.

How to redeem your coupon?

Step 1: Share this opportunity with 10 friends / groups on WhatsApp (click the "WHATSAPP" button);

Step 2: After sharing this promotion with your friends, you will be automatically redirected to receive your free Laugfs coupon.

Step 3: You will receive your voucher in 2 to 5 minutes.

At the final step, the users were redirected to WhatsApp application to share the message along with the website URL.

Our team decided to contact the Laugfs Holdings about these messages and company officials confirmed it was fake and that they had taken necessary legal action regarding this matter. We noticed that Laugfs Holdings had mentioned about this scam message on their official Facebook page as below.

Facebook link | Archived link

We also noticed one user had posted the below comment in relation to this scam message

From our more investigation, we confirm that the message being shared claiming to be from Laugfs Super with an option to redeem a free coupon by sharing a message with a third party website URL is fake. We continuously remind our readers to be aware of this kind of suspicious offers from unofficial sources and refrain from sharing any personal details. Furthermore, readers can send such unverified messages to +94771514696 to be verified

Fact Crescendo Sri Lanka debunked similar scams carried out by number of other fraudulent pages deceiving users of anniversary celebration offers of BMW SL, Honda SL, Apple Inc. etc. in the past as well.