The past couple years we’ve seen a huge rise of popularity around the Pokemon TCG. With this rise of demand also came with more people doing giveaways on social media for Pokemon cards and sealed boxes. Most people that do these giveaways are genuine. Maybe they’re trying to build a community or just help out other collectors get cool cards. The sad reality is, some people that host these giveaways have bad intentions. Recently a few people have been called out in the Pokemon community for hosting fake giveaways or just blatantly trying to scam people. Here’s how to avoid scams and fake giveaways.
Spotting Fake Pokemon Giveaways
The first and easiest thing you can do is reverse Google search the image that the host posted. This will show you if they actually took the picture themselves or just grabbed it off Google images. This doesn’t always mean the giveaway is a scam but it’s more trustworthy if they take the picture of the product themselves.
The second thing to look for before entering a giveaway hosted by someone you don’t know is look at their past giveaways. Looking at precious giveaways will show you if they’re fulfilling their promises. The winners shouldn’t be all new accounts that the host could’ve created as well.
Lastly, a well known scam through these giveaways are shipping costs. Never pay for shipping costs unless you really trust the person you’re talking to. There have been countless accounts that will message every giveaway participant, telling them they’ve won and all they need to do is pay a few dollars for shipping. Once the person sends the “shipping cost”, they get blocked or ghosted. They’ll do this to hundreds of people until they run out of people to scam.