A scam that circulated on Facebook in late March 2021 claimed that anyone who shared and commented on a post would “receive a bag full of goodies and a $75 Walmart voucher” after validating their entry at a link included in the post (archived here).
The text in the post read:
To celebrate the great news of Walmart becoming plastic bags free by the end of 2021, we are giving one of these Walmart gift-bags to everyone who has shared & commented by 7pm 24th March,.Each person who does this will receive one of these gift bag full of goodies and a $75 Walmart voucher. After that, Validate your entry @
https://bit.ly/2Qq4gwy
Snopes spoke with a representative from the chain supermarket, who confirmed that the post was fake.
“This page is not affiliated with or endorsed by Walmart. We take any fraud impacting our customers seriously and continue to implement and improve upon measures designed to help guard against various consumer scams,” Walmart spokesperson Casey Staheli told Snopes.
The scam may have been inspired by an announcement made by Walmart on Feb. 21 declaring it was reducing its use of plastic bags. As part of the “Beyond the Bag Challenge,” an international consortium of large-scale vendors, Walmart announced that stores in Mexico and Central America would go “fully bagless” — and nearly three-quarters of stores in Mexico had stopped providing plastic bags by December 2020.
Walmart stores also launched a pilot program in Vermont by implementing a reusable bags only requirement after it banned the use of plastic shopping bags in all stores effective July 2020, reported Vermont Biz.
However, the retailer did not make a promise to ban plastic bags from all its stores, nor did it offer any sort of gift bag or store credit for those that shared and commented on a Facebook post. For help identifying other potential scams, Walmart encourages consumers to visit the Fraud Alerts section on its website.