Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Wednesday, 13 November 2019

I don't think Argos is giving away free Black Friday vouchers today with "shopgift.win"

I've just seen a Facebook post suggesting that Argos is giving away a voucher today only as special deal. The link / URL / address is a little unusual in that it contains argos•co•uk but also has shopgift•win at the end of it, as part of the same link.

argos•co•uk•shopgift•win as opposed to argos•co•uk/shopgift•win

This made me a bit suspicious so I did a WHOIS search to find out a bit more by pasting the full link here http://whois.domaintools.com/

It returned this page http://whois.domaintools.com/shopgift.win telling me that the domain was registered 3 days ago. It also made it very clear (look at the lack of argos in that link) what the domain actually was. So I don't think it's really from Argos. 

Firefox also helpfully greys out bits of addresses to highlight what's the domain and what might not be.

shopgift•win is in black text, it's not really argos.co.uk

argos.co.uk is in black
In taking the next screenshot of the anonymised post on Facebook I also spotted the little info 'i' icon beween the red logos and the grey panel at the bottom, on the right...


... clicking on that tells me the same thing as above (useful info from Facebook which is a plus)


The voucher page asks questions and invites you to share a Facebook link - I'd recommend ignoring it. As I didn't find any other information about it on Google, Argos' page or on social media I thought I'd write this up in case anyone else was wondering if it was real and searched, as I did. I'm not exactly sure what the purpose of this is other than to get a link shared and perhaps access Facebook information.




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