Beware the Share-To-Watch Facebook Videos

Forcing Facebook users to share a webpage before they can access its content has always been a popular social engineering trick with scammers.

Making a user share a page as a pre-requisite to unlock the content of the page helps a webpage go viral across Facebook, because a user doesn’t realise they’ve been duped until it’s too late and they have already shared the page with their social networking friends.

The same template is used in other scams as well, including scams that claim to be giving away free vouchers, coupons or even the latest must-have electronic gadgets. Such cons tell victims that in order to claim their freebie they need to share the page on their Facebook timeline first.

A popular variant of this online trickery came in the form of an alleged video with the title “97 Percent of People Can’t Watch This for More than 10 Seconds”, which, depending on what variant you saw, included a thumbnail of either a man with a giant spot on his neck or a crocodile with a man’s hand in its mouth. (see below)

And therein lays the clever social engineering aspect of these scams – bait a user with an intriguing video and force them to share the video with their friends before they can view it. From there the scam can take any number of routes for the “end game” – exploiting the fact the Facebook user is now “invested” in the endeavour – after all, they clicked the link and now clicked the Share button.

Commonly users are then asked to fill in questionnaires that harvest their personal information, and make the scammers money. I.e. survey scams.

However the scams can have more nefarious end games. They can request a user download malicious browser extensions or other types of malware onto their computers, often tricking the user into thinking they’re downloading video plugins to watch the video.

If you think you downloaded suspicious files onto your computer, immediately run a full antivirus scan with your up-to-date antivirus software. If you do not have any or want to upgrade, click here for our recommendations.

The advice is simple. Be careful what you click on when using Facebook and never Share videos in order to view them.

Some more FAQs for further reading….

I clicked on one of these links on Facebook. Does this mean I have a virus?

No. Simply clicking the link on Facebook won’t get your computer infected. In fact most of these types of scams don’t install any type of malware at all. And if you happen to encounter a version that does, simply visiting a website won’t infect your computer. You have to be tricked into downloading files to your computer first. If you’re unsure if you did agree to something you shouldn’t have, run an antivirus scan as soon as you can to be sure.

My account keeps posting these spam links. Does that mean I have malware?

Possibly. Your account posting by itself it a possible side effect of a lot of different problems, one of them being malware or rogue browser extensions. Remember that these scams involve you clicking the Share button, meaning if you posted the spam link only once, then that’s because you clicked Share, not because of malware. If your account is posting links all of the time, and you’re not clicking on any Share buttons, then you need to work out why it’s happening, which you can do so by visiting here.

How do I watch these videos without sharing them?

You can’t, unless you can find them elsewhere on the Internet. Sometimes we see these scams force users share a video and complete surveys, and then simply forward the user to a video on YouTube! The user could have gone straight to YouTube and saw the video without the fuss! More often than not, however, the videos don’t even exist!

For recent examples of Share-To-Watch Facebook video spam on our blog, click here.