Scammers exploit viral video of girl falling into fountain while texting

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
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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.

(This does, of course, raise questions of privacy if the video was not staged. Should security workers really be posting CCTV footage onto YouTube for entertainment purposes? But that’s a debate which is off-topic for the purposes of this article.)

What’s most of interest to Naked Security readers is that scammers appear to be exploiting the rising popularity of the video for their own financial ends.

Experts at Sophos have discovered a rogue application on Facebook…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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