Beware of posts claiming Trader Joe's offers $12 gift baskets for filling out online form

In August 2025, some people began posting to Facebook about what they claimed to be a great deal on Trader Joe's products. 

The Facebook (archived) posts (archived) told (archived) similar (archived) similar stories about the poster's daughter working at Trader Joe's and telling them about a deal for people over 50. According to the posts, these people could claim a Trader Joe's gift basket for under $12 by filling out an online form. Snopes readers sent us emails and searched our site wondering if the posts were about a real offer.

The "deal" in the posts was not a real Trader Joe's offer. The supposed gift basket was a scam.

"Trader Joe's only sells products inside our stores. Trader Joe's is a card-present retailer, meaning we only accept payment in our physical store locations," Trader Joe's said when Snopes reached out by email. "We don't want anyone impersonating us and disappointing our customers, and we do everything we can to prevent this."

The accounts posting about this gift basket frequently linked to the survey people supposedly needed to fill out to claim a gift basket. 

A scan of one such link — https://food-basket.org/traderjoes — by ThreatYeti, an online software for detecting malicious links, rated the URL as "high risk." ThreatYeti found the website was created within a week of people sharing it on Facebook; phishing links and other malicious websites are often newly created because their sites eventually get discovered and taken down. ThreatYeti also found the website's host similarly hosted a number of other suspicious and high risk websites.

The above URL redirected people to another website, which is also common for phishing links and scam websites. The URL people were redirected to showed different content for human and non-human users. While human users saw a page for starting the survey, nonhuman users, such as archive tools, saw a 2013 blog post reviewing a Trader Joe's product. This is a technique scammers use called "cloaking," which helps them evade detection by search engines and security tools, according to NordVPN.

The page humans were sent to had a timer at the bottom. Creating a false sense of urgency is another common scam tactic meant to rush people into making hasty decisions without thinking them through. While there was a Trader Joe's logo at the top left of the page, clicking it did nothing (as opposed to taking the user to the Trader Joe's homepage, as it does on the company's actual website). Similarly, a search icon and shopping list icon at the top right of the page did nothing when clicked.

People who completely filled out the survey were taken to the "product page" (archived screenshot) which required a person to give out their personal information to claim the gift basket. That page also included a countdown claiming the special offer expired within a few minutes, as well as a notice that the stock was limited, which itself counted down to further create a sense of urgency.

None of the webpages people were redirected to in the process of "claiming" their gift basket were part of Trader Joe's website. It's unlikely Trader Joe's or any other legitimate retailer would host an authentic offer to customers on a website other than their own.

Scammers create pages like these to potentially harvest victims' personal information, steal their credit card info and/or "sell" them products or subscriptions that never come.