VIA Rail pass offer is a scam
Widely shared Facebook posts claim Canada’s largest passenger rail operator is offering annual passes for a dollar. This is not a genuine offer; VIA Rail confirmed it had no such promotion and has alerted customers about scams that collect fees for fake fare deals.
“Via Rail is offering a promotion where all Canadian residents can get a card for $1, which can be used to ride trains for free for a year.” says the text of a June 14 Facebook post [1]that received over 65,000 views in 24 hours.
Similar posts[2] advertise what appears to be a VIA Rail promotion to ride the system for one Canadian dollar a year. The posts were published by pages with names such as “One year pass for everyone” and “Discounts on train tickets.”
However, VIA Rail[3], a Canadian crown corporation (archived here[4]) that operates the main intercity passenger rail system across the country, stated that these offers are not legitimate.
Screenshot of one a Facebook post taken June 19, 2023
“We confirm that VIA Rail is not offering a discount card of this nature and that this is not a VIA Rail initiative,” the company told AFP in a June 16 email. “There are currently several active social media scams offering gift cards or free travel with VIA Rail in exchange for answering a survey and/or paying a small fee.”
On April 4, VIA Rail published a warning[5] on Facebook (archived here[6]), alerting customers to the presence of scams and ways to spot illegitimate offers.
Screenshot of a Facebook post taken June 19, 2023
Screenshot of VIA Rail’s advisory post, taken June 19, 2023
“VIA Rail promotional offers will only be advertised on our official channels or would link to our official accounts directly in the post,” the company said.
The rail operator, which offers some discount[7] programs but has no annual passes at this time, said it was working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to remove the fraudulent ads and invited users to report any scams.
Fraudulent elements
The pages advertising these false promotions lead to blogs[8] about travel[9] or Canadian tourism[10], but none lead to the VIA Rail website, which would be what would indicate a legitimate offer.
VIA Rail said the links attached to the ads on Facebook often led users to surveys that asked them to give personal information or pay a fee.
The Facebook pages posting the ads are not affiliated with VIA Rail and were all recently created, with a post advertising the fraudulent offer being published to the page on the same day[11] it was created.
Some of the pages[12] also included content that could appear to be VIA Rail marketing material, but these still do not lead to the official VIA Rail website.
AFP has debunked[13] other false promotion scams[14] targeting Canadians purporting to involve oil investments[15] and artificial intelligence stock trading[16].