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Home / Sport / Football

Football: Social media saboteurs hijack Champions League ticket giveaway

NZ Herald
25 May, 2017 09:53 PMQuick Read

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What started as a simple promotion to give away Champions League tickets has quickly escalated into a marketing nightmare for British potato chip company Walkers.

Launched on Twitter this morning, the automated promotion asked for fans to post a selfie, which football star Gary Lineker would hold, while delivering his branded sponsor message.

It sounded like an innocent concept, until social media saboteurs began bombarding the account with portraits of serial killers and convicted pedophiles.

Meet Walkers Crisps connoisseur Peter Sutcliffe, aka The Yorkshire Ripper ...

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Or fellow serial killer Fred West ...

As they'll be deleting this stuff we've downloaded some of the vids. Here's the Fred West one. pic.twitter.com/nASjQMeARF

— b3ta (@b3ta) May 25, 2017

Meet Rolf Harris, Aussie singer convicted of 12 counts of indecent assault ...

And here's the Rolf Harris one for prosperity pic.twitter.com/8zDX73yEXZ

— b3ta (@b3ta) May 25, 2017

Or his old mate Jimmy Savile ...

Walkers spent much of the day deleting as many of the bogus entries as they could, but should maybe wave goodbye to the #WalkersWave idea.

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Or they just received more public exposure than even they could have dreamed for ...

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