FAKE ALERT: Zander’s Taco Truck Seasoning Sample Is A Bad Copy & Paste

Note: Well look at that, it’s 8/15/18 and the domain expired. Fakeness confirmed.

I saw this Zander’s Taco Truck Seasoning on a few other freebies sites and instead of waiting until my next sample news update post, I felt I needed to address this as there are some serious red flags here.

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Here is the URL if you want to follow along, however I urge you not to share your information with this website: zanderstacotruckseasoning.com

Let’s dig into why this is likely to be a fake

1. This is a literal copy & paste of the Zing Stevia free sample page, let’s look at the side by side:
   
2. If you can read code, you’ll see whoever designed this page was careless enough to leave the majority of the Zing Stevia free sample code in there, including the Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube pages. And they left a good chunk of Zing Stevia’s tracking and marketing information. If you happen to share this site on social media, it’ll even show up as Zing Stevia’s page and not the Taco page. In short, it’s a really lazy move. As far as I can tell the only work that was put into this site was put into one part of the website: the part that collects your personal information and stores it somewhere. This alone is a huge red flag. What are they doing with it?
3. You can pretty much enter anything you want in the form, not a sign it’s fully fake, but not a good sign it’s serious either.
4. The website was registered on July 10th 2017 and will expire July 10th 2018. I’d bet money you won’t see this website after July 10th 2018 on the internet.
5. On a positive note, I didn’t see any malicious code on the site from what I can tell. So if I had to make an assumption, it appears to be an information harvesting website run by a single person and not a criminal gang which would be much more sophisticated.

My hunch is this is a lazy marketing person with pretty horrible coding skills who wants your email and address to use for marketing and or spam purposes or in a few months or a year from now you’ll see it redirect to another freebie site. Some websites have been known to do tactics like this to game the Google search rankings in the past. Whatever becomes of this website, I highly doubt it’s a real company or a real free sample program. In case I’m wrong, I’ve reached out to them for comment and I invite the founder of Zander’s “Taco Seasoning” to reach out to clear up why they copy/pasted another website so carelessly. If you signed up for this one, worst case is you’ll get some spam mail, spam email and perhaps some sketchy links from fake PayPal/Amazon/other websites. Don’t trust links that ask for your password or any personal information, ever. Thank you for reading my fake freebie rant.

-John ‘Samples’ Clark