Major retailers are quietly running clearance offers almost nobody knows about: a Dyson for £8.55, a Samsung S25 Ultra given away to Facebook users, a designer perfume for £3, all available if you complete a short survey
By The Conspiratory EditorsAugust 10, 2026
Where the evidence lands: ContradictedThat major high-street retailers are running unadvertised clearance and customer-appreciation promotions, discoverable through posts shared by ordinary people rather than through official channels, in which premium goods can be obtained for a few pounds by completing a short online survey.
Contradicted. None of these offers exist. Full Fact checked four of them in six days in August 2026, against Currys twice, Screwfix and John Lewis, and in each case either the retailer confirmed directly that the offer was not theirs or the link led to a site that was not the retailer's. The mechanism is worth knowing because it is the same every time: a personal-sounding post, a family member said to work at the shop, a display or clearance model as the excuse for an impossible price, and a survey standing between you and the deal. One detail nobody has remarked on is visible in Full Fact's own verbatim quotation of the Currys post: the brand name in it is not spelled in the Latin alphabet. It carries a Cyrillic capital Es and a Cyrillic u, so the word a reader sees as Currys is a different string from the one a brand-monitoring filter would be looking for.
Believed by: General Facebook users rather than any identifiable group, reached through posts that read as personal recommendations from an acquaintance rather than as advertising
Opening entry, prompted by a cluster rather than a single item: four Full Fact checks in six days, on 6 and 10 August, covering Currys twice, Screwfix and John Lewis. The reason to build the genre rather than any one offer is that the four posts run the same script with different logos, and the script is the thing a reader can actually learn to recognise. One finding is added here that none of the four checks makes: in Full Fact's verbatim quotation of the Currys Dyson post, the brand name contains a Cyrillic capital Es and a Cyrillic small u. Full Fact marked the misspelled product name with a [sic] and left the brand name unremarked, which is understandable, because on screen it is indistinguishable. It is not indistinguishable to a search index. source →
The full story
Four offers, six days, one script
Between 6 and 10 August 2026 the UK fact-checking charity Full Fact published four separate checks on retail offers circulating on Facebook. A Dyson Cyclone V10 from Currys for £8.55. Samsung S25 Ultras being given away by Currys to Facebook users. Makita display drill sets from Screwfix for under ten pounds. A full-size bottle of Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540 from John Lewis for £3.
Currys told Full Fact the Dyson offer was not genuine. A John Lewis spokesperson said the same about the perfume, and added the detail that matters: real offers from the retailer appear on its website or its app. Four checks in six days is not four coincidences. It is a format working at volume, and the individual offers are the least interesting thing about it.
What is worth learning is the script, because it is identical underneath four different logos. Every version is written in the first person. Every version explains the impossible price as display or clearance stock. Most versions carry a reason you have not seen it anywhere official. And every version puts a survey between the reader and the thing.
The relative who works there
The John Lewis posts are supposedly written by someone whose oldest daughter works at John Lewis. The Currys post opens with a confidence: “Recently, I came across a clearance sale that almost nobody knows about.”
That is not decoration. It is the load-bearing element, and it exists to answer the question every reader is about to ask, which is why an offer this good is not on the shop's own website. An insider relative answers it in five words. It also changes what kind of message this is: not a company making a claim to a customer, which invites scrutiny, but an acquaintance passing on something they heard, which invites reciprocity. You are not being sold to. You are being let in on something.
The eligibility qualifiers do similar work. The perfume version is restricted to people over 25. A restriction implies a real promotion with real terms behind it, and it costs the author nothing to invent.
The brand name is not the brand name
Full Fact quoted the Currys post verbatim, and in doing so preserved something the check itself does not discuss. The word that reads as Currys in that quotation is not spelled in the Latin alphabet. It opens with a Cyrillic capital letter Es and carries a Cyrillic small letter u in place of the second u. The check attaches a [sic] to the garbled product name, Cyclony, and leaves the brand name alone, which is entirely reasonable: on a screen, at any size, the two are the same shape.
They are not the same string. This substitution, sometimes called a homoglyph or homograph technique, is long established in phishing, and its purpose is not to fool the reader. The reader is supposed to see the brand. Its purpose is to fool anything that matches on text: a platform rule watching for a retailer's name, a brand-protection service scanning for impersonation, a keyword search run by the company's own legal team. A post that spells the brand in mixed alphabets is invisible to all of them while remaining perfectly legible to a person.
It is the clearest available evidence that these posts are not casual opportunism. Somebody took a deliberate step to defeat automated detection while preserving human readability, which is a design decision, not an accident of typing.
Why an absurd price makes the post work better, not worse
An £8.55 Dyson is a discount of well over ninety-nine percent. On the face of it that should kill the post immediately, and for most readers it presumably does. It survives anyway, and the reason is worth being precise about.
The number is doing selection rather than persuasion. A plausible offer, say thirty percent off, would draw a much wider audience of people who then compare it against the retailer's actual site and leave. An impossible offer filters hard for the people who will not check, and those are exactly the people the funnel is built for. The absurdity is not a flaw in the lure. It is the sorting mechanism.
The clearance framing then supplies the one thing the number needs, which is any explanation at all. Ex-display goods really are sold cheaply, so the category is familiar even though the figure attached to it is not, and the reader is offered a story in which the price is strange for a reason rather than strange full stop.
And the asymmetry closes it. Two minutes of survey against a five-hundred-pound vacuum cleaner is a bet that looks free. It is not free, but what it costs is not visible at the moment of deciding, and that gap is the entire business model.
What this genre is not, and why that matters
Most fabricated content this site covers is trying to make you believe something: about a politician, a minority, an agency, an event. This is not that. Nobody involved cares whether you end up with a view about Currys. The post is not an argument, it is a door, and everything in it, the daughter, the clearance, the specific product model, is engineering aimed at getting one click.
That distinction matters for how it should be countered. Fact-checks work on claims by establishing what is true, and Full Fact duly established that these offers do not exist. But a reader who never reads the fact-check is not defended by it, and the next post will carry a different retailer and a different product anyway. What transfers is the shape: a personal voice, an insider, a clearance excuse, a survey, and a link whose domain is not the shop's.
Full Fact's own standing advice points the same way. Check whether an offer has been shared through the company's official channels. That is a test of the route rather than of the claim, and for this genre the route is the only thing that ever differs from the real world.
The tell is the survey
If a single thing is worth carrying away from four checks in six days, it is that no retailer requires you to answer questions to qualify for a price. Sales are advertised, not unlocked. A promotion that exists to be discovered rather than announced is not a promotion.
The offers here were fabrications, and the two retailers who were asked said so in plain terms. Underneath them sat a script that changed nothing but its logo across four separate posts, and, in at least one case, a brand name assembled from two alphabets so that machines would not recognise what people were meant to read at a glance. That is the level of care being applied to a post about a vacuum cleaner, which should tell you what is actually being collected.
What's still unexplained
- Whether the four August posts come from one operation or several is not established. They share a script closely enough to suggest a common template, but no fact-check has linked them, and a widely copied format can look like a single actor when it is not.
- How widely the homoglyph substitution is used across this genre is unknown. It is confirmed in the Currys post because Full Fact quoted it character for character; nobody has checked whether the other posts do the same.
- What the surveys collect, and what happens after the last question, is outside the scope of any of the four checks. The pages exist and the funnel is documented; its destination is not, and this file will not guess at it.
Point by point
The claim: Currys is selling a Dyson Cyclone V10 for £8.55 to people who complete a survey.
What the record shows: Currys confirmed to Full Fact that this is not a genuine offer from the retailer. The post's own link goes to a site that displays the Currys logo but sits on a URL that is not Currys' official domain, which is the ordinary shape of a brand-impersonation page rather than a promotion.
The claim: John Lewis is giving away a designer perfume for £3 to customers over 25.
What the record shows: A John Lewis spokesperson told Full Fact directly that this is not a real offer, and that genuine offers from the retailer appear on its website or its app. The posts are written as though from someone whose eldest daughter works at the store, which is the element that pre-empts the obvious objection: if this were real, why is it not on the John Lewis site?
The claim: These are real clearance promotions that simply have not been publicised, which is why they are only spreading person to person.
What the record shows: Retailers do not run unadvertised promotions that can only be found through anonymous Facebook posts, and both retailers who were asked said so. The clearance framing is not incidental, it is load-bearing: it supplies the only available explanation for a price that would otherwise be obviously impossible. A Dyson Cyclone V10 for £8.55 is a discount of well over ninety-nine percent, and no clearance mechanism produces that.
The claim: It is a scam, but a harmless one, since you can just not complete the survey.
What the record shows: The survey is not an obstacle before the prize; on the evidence of the pages involved it is the point of the exercise. Full Fact's standing advice on these posts is to check whether an offer has been shared through the company's own official channels, which is advice about the destination rather than about the offer. What the four checks establish is the funnel; what happens at the end of it is beyond what any of them documents, and this file does not assert more than that.
The claim: A convincing brand name means the post is at least coming from somewhere legitimate.
What the record shows: In at least one of these cases the brand name is not the brand name. The Currys post as quoted by Full Fact spells it with a Cyrillic capital Es and a Cyrillic small u. Those characters are visually near-identical to their Latin counterparts and completely distinct to any system matching on text, which means a search or an automated brand-monitoring rule looking for the retailer's name will not match the post. A reader sees the brand; a filter sees a string it has never encountered.
Timeline
- 2026-08-06Full Fact publishes two checks on the same day. Facebook posts claim Screwfix is selling Makita display drill sets for less than ten pounds. Separately, posts claim John Lewis is giving away a full-size bottle of Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540 Extrait de Parfum for three pounds to people over 25 who fill out a survey, framed as an 'early clearance and customer appreciation offer'.
- 2026-08-06The John Lewis posts are written in the voice of someone whose 'oldest daughter works at John Lewis'. A John Lewis spokesperson tells Full Fact this is not a real offer and that genuine offers appear on the company's website or app. The insider relative is doing the work that a brand logo alone could not: it explains why you have not seen this anywhere official.
- 2026-08-10Two more checks, both naming Currys. One concerns Samsung S25 Ultras supposedly being given away to Facebook users. The other concerns a Dyson Cyclone V10 for £8.55, framed as 'a clearance sale that almost nobody knows about', available to anyone who completes a short survey on the retailer's website.
- 2026-08-10Currys confirms to Full Fact that the Dyson offer is not genuine. Full Fact notes that the post includes a link to a website carrying the Currys logo but on a URL that is not the company's official site, and adds that it regularly checks fake offers purportedly from Currys and other retailers.
- 2026-08-10A detail sits in plain sight in Full Fact's verbatim quotation of the Currys post and is not remarked on. The check flags the misspelled product name with a [sic], but the brand name itself is also irregular: as published, it contains a Cyrillic capital Es and a Cyrillic small u among the Latin characters. Visually it reads as Currys. As data it is a different word.
- 2026-08-10Across the four checks a consistent script is visible: first-person narration, an insider relative or a chance discovery, display or clearance stock as the reason for the price, an age or eligibility qualifier in some versions, and a survey as the required step. The retailers change; the structure does not.
Contradicted. None of these offers exist. Full Fact checked four of them in six days in August 2026, against Currys twice, Screwfix and John Lewis, and in each case either the retailer confirmed directly that the offer was not theirs or the link led to a site that was not the retailer's. The mechanism is worth knowing because it is the same every time: a personal-sounding post, a family member said to work at the shop, a display or clearance model as the excuse for an impossible price, and a survey standing between you and the deal. One detail nobody has remarked on is visible in Full Fact's own verbatim quotation of the Currys post: the brand name in it is not spelled in the Latin alphabet. It carries a Cyrillic capital Es and a Cyrillic u, so the word a reader sees as Currys is a different string from the one a brand-monitoring filter would be looking for.
Reviewed by The Conspiratory Editors · Last reviewed August 10, 2026 · How we rate
Common questions
Is The survey clearance offers true?
Contradicted. None of these offers exist. Full Fact checked four of them in six days in August 2026, against Currys twice, Screwfix and John Lewis, and in each case either the retailer confirmed directly that the offer was not theirs or the link led to a site that was not the retailer's. The mechanism is worth knowing because it is the same every time: a personal-sounding post, a family member said to work at the shop, a display or clearance model as the excuse for an impossible price, and a survey standing between you and the deal. One detail nobody has remarked on is visible in Full Fact's own verbatim quotation of the Currys post: the brand name in it is not spelled in the Latin alphabet. It carries a Cyrillic capital Es and a Cyrillic u, so the word a reader sees as Currys is a different string from the one a brand-monitoring filter would be looking for.
What is The survey clearance offers?
In the first ten days of August 2026 the UK fact-checking charity Full Fact debunked four separate viral offers in the name of well-known retailers: a Dyson Cyclone V10 from Currys for £8.55, Samsung S25 Ultras being given away by Currys to Facebook users, Makita display drill sets from Screwfix for under a tenner, and a full-size bottle…
What does the evidence show?
Currys confirmed to Full Fact that this is not a genuine offer from the retailer. The post's own link goes to a site that displays the Currys logo but sits on a URL that is not Currys' official domain, which is the ordinary shape of a brand-impersonation page rather than a promotion.
Why do people believe it?
The posts do not read like advertising. They read like a person telling you something, in the first person, with a small piece of provenance attached, and that register bypasses the scepticism a banner ad would trigger immediately.
What is still unresolved?
Whether the four August posts come from one operation or several is not established. They share a script closely enough to suggest a common template, but no fact-check has linked them, and a widely copied format can look like a single actor when it is not.
Sources
- 1.Currys isn't selling Dyson vacuum cleaners for £8.55, Full Fact (2026)
- 2.No, Currys isn't giving away Samsung S25 Ultras to Facebook users, Full Fact (2026)
- 3.No, Screwfix is not selling display drill sets for less than a tenner, Full Fact (2026)
- 4.John Lewis isn't giving away Maison Francis Kurkdjian perfume for £3, Full Fact (2026)
- 5.IDN homograph attack, Wikipedia (2026)
- 6.Phishing, Wikipedia (2026)
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