A rare red fox (left) seen in a viral video in the snow that's been viewed 110 million times, turns out to be a much more ordinary grey fox that had been tinted a bright red in the video just to get more likes. Screeenshot from Pear Video.

A rare red fox seen in a viral video prancing in the snow that's been viewed 110 million times, turns out to be a much more ordinary grey fox that had been tinted a bright red in the video just to get more likes. 

The falsehood was revealed after the person who took the video shot in the wilderness in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, complained that the original video had been copied, altered and reposted on social media. 

A new posting on Sina Weibo by Pear Video shows a split screen of the original video of the grey fox beside the same video with the animal colored a scarlet red.   

A forest ranger, surnamed He, had claimed she had come across the red fox and shot the video but has now admitted that was a lie and has apologized for the subterfuge. 

The person who actually took the video, surnamed Li, told the media that a friend changed the color of the fox and then reposted the video, after the original one featuring the grey fox received few views. 

"I failed to verify the authenticity of the video and animal before it was posted on social media," the forest ranger, He, told Pear Video. "What I did was wrong and you can report it is a lie."

The red fox mainly lives in China's Tibet Autonomous Region far from Xinjiang, and are listed as a second-tier protected animals. Their numbers have been in sharp decline in recent years. 

"Nowadays, humans are more cunning than foxes," said an internet user on Twitter-like Sina Weibo on Tuesday. 

Pear Video