Facebook and Skype teamed up to bring you video calling, but at the same time, scammers are teaming up to trick you into spamming all your Facebook friends, using the lure of the new video calling feature. Here’s how to sidestep that scam.
There’s a legitimate way to sign up for Facebook Video Calling, where you’re asked to download a program from the official Facebook Video Calling page, and then the chat window asks you to configure a few Flash settings.
That looks like the graphic below. While the service is working for some lucky users, as you can see, when I tried it a few minutes ago, it wasn’t working yet for me, notifying me that “video calling will be available soon, please check back later.”
However, the scam comes to you in the form of a wall post, enticing you to “Enable video calls.” Don’t click that link, advises Naked Security, which supplied the graphic below:
If you do click on that bogus message, it asks for access to your basic information, wants to post to your wall, to access your posts in your newsfeed and access your data at any time.
What does it do then? It doesn’t let you video chat at all, but simply tries to get you to fill out surveys so its evil creators can collect referral fees. Worse, it exposes your friends to the same trick.
Don’t click those fake links. If you want the actual Facebook Video Calling, it’s available now for some users but not others, and you haven’t already been granted access, you will be soon.
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