14,000 people fooled by fake SAS Instagram account

The Instagram account SAS Scandinavian, @scandinavianairlines, promised two tickets to New York including 5 stars (sic) hotel to the first 20,000 people that followed the account. The account quickly attracted more than 14,000 followers.

SAS Instagram fake account

Of course, this was not the official account of the Scandinavian airline, which can be found at @FLYSAS. Instead, the account soon changed name to @s0viknes and it belongs to, it seems, a young Norwegian guy who did this as a prank to get a lot of followers. He boasts: “follow this king who tricked them all”.

Note: I have cropped this photo because it seems the person in the photo was not the person behind the account.

SAS fake account on Instagram

As always, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. If SAS would give away 40,000 airline tickets that would cost about 44 million USD. Plus hotel rooms for 40,000 people. That’s just ridiculous. And you would think that the lousy English spelling would reveal that this was not an official account. Please think before you follow and share hoaxes like these.

And for brands, it is always wise to secure the most apparent versions of your brand name on popular social networks. At least that makes it a bit harder for others to use your brand to scam people.

Update: Several similar fake accounts have apparently appeared the last week. Via @AndersEriksson we can see a screen shot from the fake @emirates_dubai here: http://instagram.com/p/Vb9H-VNmYo/

And one account is pretending to be the Swedish cinema chain SF: @sfbioofficial. It says it will hand out 10,000 movie tickets to people who follow the account and add their email address in the comments to an image. More than 6,500 comments can be found so far, most of them include email addresses to teens and kids. And new comments are still being added every second as I blog this. The official account can be found at @SFBIO.

Parents, you need to have a talk with your kids about scams on Instagram. Found via @kingdeborg and @jonatanahlin on Twitter.

sfbio instagram

Update 2: The account @sfbioofficial changed name to @williammkarlsson, then reappeared with the first name with new followers and new images. @williammkarlsson is now gone, hopefully because it got reported as spam. The scam continues and new comments are added every minute. It seems that the account adds a new image now and then to attract new followers and commenters.

Top Facebook pages in Sweden – December 2012

Socialbakers just released new statistics for top Facebook pages in Sweden, in December 2012.

An interesting change from previous reports is that now local fans from global pages are included. That means for example that Coca-Cola, Ben & Jerry’s  and Converse now all are in the top ten based on number of fans.

facebook pages sweden dec 2012

Infographic: H&M vs Spotify on Twitter

H&M is the Swedish brand with most followers on Twitter. But Spotify, which is the second largest brand, creates more engagement around each tweet.

Here is an infographic that illustrates the battle for the top spot among Swedish brands on Twitter. Created with visual.ly.

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infographic-twitter

Six Swedish companies among the Top 100 Global Innovators

Thomson Reuters just released a new report that presents the world leaders in innovation. Companies with more than 100 innovative patens from the last three years were analyzed and six Swedish companies are among the final Top 100 Global Innovators:

  • Alfa Laval
  • Atlas Copco
  • Ericsson
  • Sandvik
  • Scania
  • Volvo

Sweden is only lagging behind the US, Japan and France when it comes to number of companies included in the list. No companies from our neighbours Denmark, Norway or Finland are included.

chart-top-100-global-innovators

Full report can be found here.