Scammers exploit viral video of girl falling into fountain

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Jack

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Jan 24, 2011
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A YouTube video is beginning to be shared widely across the internet this weekend, apparently showing a girl in a mall, who is so distracted by sending text messages on her mobile phone that she falls into a fountain.

The footage appears to be taken from CCTV security cameras and you can hear the laughter of mall employees as they watch the girl time and time again fall face first into the fountain.

Watch Youtube Video- Girl falls into fountain while texting at the Berkshire Mall -


Experts at Sophos have discovered a rogue application on Facebook which sends links from your profile, claiming to point to the video - but which are really intended to generate income for the scammers by making you complete surveys and compromise your account to spread the links even further.

Imagine you see a message like the following posted by one of your Facebook friends. Would you click on the link?
fountain-1.jpg


If you were to click then you would be taken to a flashy advert for the video you are about to see:
fountain-2.jpg

If you do click to see more, then you are asked to give permission for a third-party Facebook application to access your account.

fountain-3.jpg

As you can see (if you bother to read the small print), the rogue application wants to access your name, gender, list of friends, profile picture and other information. It also requests the rights to post to your wall (including any Facebook pages you manage) and even email you directly.

Should this really be necessary in order to watch a video that's freely available on YouTube?

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