Watch out for Facebook YouTube scam

Posted by Bradley Wint on 04/03/2011

A new scam has started spreading across Facebook, tricking users into clicking on videos in order to “like” that page in a possible attempt to collect personal information.

I first spotted the links on Facebook, some of which had some pretty interesting titles, nothing too outlandish but not lame at the same time.

The giveaway in the above photo is the URL. Since it’s not a youtube.com address, already you have noted that it’s a scam. I decided to test it out and it took me to a TLD page that was an almost exact replica of a YouTube video page (seen at the top). There are some obvious giveaways including the logo which says FouTube and not YouTube. The fonts are also wrong, the channel image says “Ecxlusive Videos” and for a video with 1 million+ views, it’s surprising there are no comments at all.

It turns out the entire site is just a big image with embedded Javascript. When you click on it, it will automatically “Like” the video if you are logged onto Facebook, and some of them try to force you to do a fraudulent survey as part of its “Age Verification” process.

All in all, these scam sites are trying to collect personal data from you, and some may even try to swindle money from you, so do take care when browsing. If you have accidentally clicked the video on a site like this, go to your profile page and remove the post from the stream and Unlike it so others don’t fall bait to the scam.