Free Prize Scam: Why 'Just Pay Shipping' Is the Scam

A free prize that asks you to pay shipping, taxes or insurance is not a prize. The FTC states it in one line: real prizes are free. The fee is the product, and the checkout page behind it usually harvests your card number, address and identity data as well.

The version that spreads fastest carries no link, no price and no request for money in the post itself. It is missing everything a scam is supposed to have. That is the design.

How it works

1. The post arrives without an offer. A parent in a local buy-and-sell group writes that their child has died and that the console bought as a gift is still boxed. No link. No price. Comments are turned off. Interested people are asked to send a private message.
2. The words are not theirs. Malwarebytes documented the template in 2022, down to the sentence structure, replicated account to account with only the child’s gender changed. The post is a script in circulation, not a person in mourning.
3. The photographs are not theirs either. AAP FactCheck traced pictures used in these posts to a US childhood-cancer charity, Strong Little Souls, which said it had them removed many times. This industry does not fake grief. It shoplifts it.
4. The account may not be theirs. In March 2024, 41 state attorneys general wrote to Meta about account-takeover complaints. In New York alone they rose from 73 in 2019 to 783 by the end of 2023, more than tenfold. A stolen profile with real friends and years of history is the cheapest trust available.
5. The private message builds an obligation. The item is promised to you. You are asked not to resell it, out of respect. Now backing out feels like a betrayal rather than a decision.
6. The fee is small on purpose. Courier costs. Around fifty dollars. Paid through a payment app, to an account whose name does not match the person in the post. The FBI has a term for that account holder: a money mule.
7. Then the fee has children. Insurance, refundable on delivery. Customs. A release charge. Each payment invents the next one, and the sunk cost does the arguing for them.
8. The second door is worse than the first. Instead of a fee, some versions send a courier tracking link with a checkout page. Bitdefender documented what those pages collect: full card numbers including the CVV, names, addresses, phone numbers, even Social Security numbers, plus recurring charges the victim never authorised.

Key facts

• The FTC counted $2.1 billion in reported losses to scams that started on social media in 2025, eight times the 2020 figure, and reported that nearly 30% of people who lost money to fraud that year said it began on social media. More money was lost to scams that started on Facebook than on any other platform (FTC Data Spotlight, April 2026).
• The FBI’s official category for paying and never receiving, non-payment and non-delivery, accounted for $503,373,587 across 56,478 complaints in 2025 (IC3 2025 Annual Report).
• Online purchase scams were 30.3% of everything reported to the BBB Scam Tracker in 2024, and 87.5% of the people who reported one lost money (BBB Institute 2024 Risk Report). Engaging is not a neutral act. It is close to nine in ten.
• Meta says it removed over 159 million scam ads in 2025 and took down 10.9 million accounts associated with criminal scam centres, with 92% of the ads removed before anyone reported them (Meta Newsroom).

Enforcement at that scale mows the lawn. It does not pull the roots: the losses reported to the FTC still climbed to eight times the 2020 figure while it was happening.

How to spot it

1. Free that charges is not free. The FTC’s language is exact: “Real prizes are free.” Shipping and handling, taxes, insurance, processing, customs. Any of them ends the conversation.
2. Comments off, messages only. Disabled comments are not privacy. They stop the neighbour who has seen the post before from typing so under it.
3. The payment method is the confession. Friends and Family, gift card, wire transfer, crypto or cash all share one property: no dispute to open. PayPal states plainly that Friends and Family payments are not covered by Purchase Protection.
4. The name on the payment does not match the name on the post. That is not sloppiness. That is a mule account, and the FBI describes the role in its own material.
5. Run the search test. Copy one full sentence from the post, put it in quotation marks, and search it. The same bereaved parent appears in dozens of towns. It takes twenty seconds.
6. Run the picture back. A reverse image search on the photo usually finds the child, the room or the boxed console somewhere it was taken from.
7. Never type card details into a page you reached from a message. Legitimate delivery never needs your CVV, and it never needs your Social Security number.

What to do if it already happened

1. Stop paying. The insurance charge, the customs charge, the last one before delivery. None of them ends the ladder.
2. Call your bank or card issuer today and say the words fraud and dispute. If you paid by card, you have a chargeback path. If you paid through a payment app, report it in the app and to the bank behind it.
3. Report it. The FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, the FBI at ic3.gov, and the BBB Scam Tracker. Reports are what produced the numbers above.
4. If you gave out personal data, including your Social Security number, work through identitytheft.gov and place a fraud alert with the credit bureaus.
5. If your card touched a courier checkout page, treat the card as compromised and have it replaced, then watch for small recurring charges rather than one large one.
6. If the post came from someone you know, contact them another way. Their account was probably taken over, and they are being used as the mask.
7. Report the post and the profile to the platform. It costs you nothing and it is the only signal that reaches the takedown pipeline.

Watch the full documentary

The full case, the money trail and the four fingerprints are in the documentary: Don’t Take the “Free” PS5 from a Grieving Stranger.

FAQ

Is the free PS5 giveaway on Facebook real? No. Malwarebytes documented the post as a fixed template, copied account to account with only the child’s gender changed, and classed it as advance-fee fraud. The console does not exist. The shipping fee does.

Why would a stranger give away an expensive console to someone they have never met? They are not giving anything away. The grief story exists to make the fee feel like a courtesy rather than a purchase, and to make questions feel rude. The FTC’s test cuts through it: if you have to pay to get your prize, it is a scam.

Is it safe to pay a small shipping fee for something that is free? No, and the size is deliberate. A small fee is easier to approve than to interrogate. The FTC lists shipping and handling, taxes and processing fees as the standard demands of a fake prize offer, and the payment rails requested, gift cards, wire transfers, cash or crypto, are the ones with no dispute process.

The seller only accepts Friends and Family, Cash App or Zelle. Is that a red flag? It is the confession. PayPal states that Friends and Family payments are not covered by Purchase Protection, so there is no dispute to open. Insisting on that method is a choice about what you will be able to do afterwards.

The photos looked real, so how can the post be fake? The photos usually are real, just stolen. AAP FactCheck traced images used in these posts back to a US childhood-cancer charity, Strong Little Souls, which said it had them taken down repeatedly. The grief in the picture belongs to somebody else.

Related

When the free gift is offered by a famous face instead of a grieving stranger, it is the celebrity crypto giveaway deepfake. When the borrowed trust is a brand rather than a person, it is the fake Microsoft security alert. And the same fee-to-release trick, scaled into the billions, is how the pig butchering scam closes.