Sorry, but how did 300,000 people fall for this ASOS scam?

Cast your mind back about 12 years to when you first started your hotmail account.

You forwarded a lot of shit from someone random that may or may not have threatened death if you didn't immediately forward it to 15 of your friends.

But now, it's 2018 and that's just happened to hundreds of thousands of people with a new fake insta trend.

Yesterday, accounts called things like 'asosoffers' sprung up and promised free giftcards to their first 50,000 followers and all they had to do was tag them in an story and over 300,000 people followed and fell for it.

ASOS confirmed that it was obviously scam and they had nothing to do with the accounts, which have now been transformed into completely unrelated generic pages.

You'd think that the lack of blue tick, the fact that there was only one post and even the name 'asosoffers' would have all been clues that this miiiight not be legit.

And yet, over 300,000 people fell for the ASOS one alone, desperate to get their £100 gift card for doing absolutely nothing.

Now, if you go to the page that was formerly @asosoffers, it's a private account called "thebestofredditnews", it has over 200k followers and has shed all indication that it was ever an ASOS page for gullible Fiat 500 Twitter gals.

Another one with over 150k rebranded to an earth-porn page overnight, with no indication that they ever gave away a gift card to anyone. SHOCK!

A spokesperson for Instagram told The Tab: “We work aggressively to fight spam and fake accounts on Instagram. If people see these types of accounts, we advise them to report them using our in-app tools, so that we can immediately remove them.”

As much as I'd love to believe that companies did this out of the true goodness of their heart, I guess the moral of all this is that maybe just maybe if it's too good to be true and has no obvious way for the brand to make money, there's a 99.9 per cent chance it's not real.

To everyone that followed these hoping to get some free stuff, we're not mad, we're just disappointed.