A Facebook post claiming that a “giant anaconda” or the “world’s largest anaconda” has eaten a zookeeper in South Africa is nothing more than a scam try to get people to click on a webpage for pageviews.
When one clicks on the post, they are directed to a website designed to look like Facebook. It then asks the user to share the video first before viewing the content.
There is no video of a “giant anaconda” eating a zookeeper. The image used in the post has been used in other scams, and it has been used for several years.
A Hoax-Slayer post in January shows a scam with the same exact image. The scam “is a very poorly rendered composite that users the following image as its source. The ”zookeeper“ has been ineptly added to the original snake image via Photoshop or another image manipulation program. The original image has circulated in different contexts for several years,” Hoax-Slayer says.
The scam either directs the user to a website for traffic, directs them to a survey scam that one should not fill out, or it prompts the download of potentially malicious software or a rogue Facebook app.
Facebook offers advice about such scam posts.
“Think before you click. Never click suspicious links, even if they come from a friend or a company you know. This includes links sent on Facebook (ex: in a chat or post) or in emails. If one of your friends clicks on spam they could accidentally send you that spam or tag you in a spammy post. You also shouldn’t download things (ex: a .exe file) if you aren’t sure what they are,” it reads.
