"Girl killed herself" Facebook scam - be aware before you Share!

You know the saying about buses - you don't see one for ages, then three come along at once.

Facebook scams and hoaxes are a bit like that, except for the "you don't see one for ages" part.

But, judging by the most popular articles on Naked Security over the past couple of weeks, large-scale hoaxes and scams do sometimes come in threes.

A perfecta of long-running Facebook falsehoods has topped the charts recently.

Firstly, it was Talking Angela, the chat bot cat that was accused of all sorts ofdubious behavior - including behavior that isn't programmed into the software, couldn't have happened, yet was widely and regularly reported by people claiming "I saw it with my own eyes."

Secondly, it was the annual "Facebook will close from 29-31 February" hoax, circulated presumably as a joke but apparently taken seriously by some.

Now, it's the venerable "Girl killed herself video" bait-and-switch scam, already in its fifth year, that is making a reappearance.

→ Hoaxes and scams aren't the same, but they are similar in how they end up being shared over and over again. Generally, hoaxes are bogus warnings that spread because people forward them on the assumption that it's better to be safe than sorry. Scams are bogus links that spread because people forward them in return for some illusory benefit, such as access to an intriguing-sounding video.

We've written about the "Girl killed herself" video before, right back to 2010.

There are numerous variations on the theme, but the premise is often that a teenager committed suicide in shame after being caught out, perhaps by her own father, in some sort of inappropriate online activity.

There's a video, and you're invited to watch.

Here's how this sort of scam plays out, based on one of the versions circulating right now:

1. One of your friends Shares a link along the lines of "Girl killed herself live on cam."

2. It comes from a friend, so you click the link and arrive at a page that doesn't overtly claim to be affiliated with Facebook, but nevertheless uses visual clues to make it look more official than it is.

3. You're invited to Like the publisher's Facebook page, a request that seems routine and harmless enough:

4. If you take a look, the publisher's page was recently created and might best be described as uninspired and uninspiring, but it seems harmless enough, perhaps leading you into a false sense of safety. (Banality is a surprisingly good cover for scammers, when you think about it.)

5. You can skip past the Like popup, but before you watch the video, you are forced to Share it:

 6. And once you have shared it, you need to answer some questions as a sort of CAPTCHA - one of those tests to prove you're a person, in this case a person who's old enough to watch adult videos:

→ CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Procedure for Telling Computers and Humans Apart. CAPTCHAs are challenges that are meant to be reasonably easy for humans to work out, but tricky for computers to process accurately. Examples include reading fuzzy characters against a distracting background, or answering arithmetical questions written out longhand using words, not symbols.

Except that the questions to prove you are illegible are, in fact, pay-per-click surveys or special offer pages that clock up revenue for the scammers every time someone fills them in: