Facebook and Apple giving away free iPads? It must be too good to be true! Spoiler: It is.

CNET is reporting that there’s a new spam scam hitting Facebook today. The message is innocuous enough: Mark Zuckerberg has just sent an e-mail informing the lucky winner that they have won a free iPad.

Now the link to claim the free iPad doesn’t take people to Facebook, but rather a promotional Web site that claims to need your e-mail address, phone number and other account information.

If the “lucky winner” tries to claim their prize, they will be taken to a Web site that explains they are a potential winner. So we’re now going from winner to potential winner. To really win, you have to answer a simple question. It’s like if the lottery required winners to answer a random trivia question to claim their money.

The scammers aren’t all terrible people though, so they warn everybody that claiming the free iPad will add a small weekly fee onto your phone bill. At least they were nice enough to warn people in the smallest print possible.

Like always, the real reason for this is that the spammer gets an affiliate commission every time somebody is foolish enough to sign up for the contest.

As CNET points out, the best part is that Mark Zuckerberg apparently sent the e-mail via a hotmail account. Who still uses that anyway?

As with all these scams, use common sense. It’s highly unlikely that Apple and Facebook would give away free iPads. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

[Lead image courtesy of Technologizer]