Here’s a Facebook scam / fake video currently in circulation. Warning: a generally terrible standard of English used throughout:
“Shocking Video: Hungry bear tear women into pieces in few secondsPeoples didnot [sic] saved her instead of filming the footage”
Rest assured, the bear did not “tear women into pieces in few seconds”. The above image is lifted from an incident back in 2009 where a lady jumped into a polar bear enclosure in Berlin Zoo (if you didn’t read the news article, she survived).
Clicking the link takes end-users to the following cut-and-paste scam page, commonly recycled across a wide range of fake scam videos:
Attempting to play the video leads end-users to a blog popping a survey page:
The person behind scams such as the above typically receive an affiliate payout for every survey filled in.
Depending on region, the end-user could encounter everything from questions and ringtone sign-ups to installable software and potentially unwanted programs.
There actually is a video at the end of all these steps, but it’s an entirely unrelated YouTube video concerning a 15-year-old who committed suicide due to bullying.
As with all of these supposedly viral videos offering up “shocking” or salacious footage on Facebook, the best thing to do is let your friend know they’re posting content that they shouldn’t be and avoid getting suckered into the scam yourself.
Avoiding angry bears is always good advice, though…
Christopher Boyd (Thanks to Adam for finding this)
