Based on reports, these hackers have created fake tribute Facebook pages as a way to gain quick cash. There are at least six Facebook pages that have been discovered with each of them carrying the theme of commemorating the victims of the tragic Flight MH17 incident.
The pages were learned as fake after users clicked the site and were redirected to a different page. It wasn't a page where they can honor the dead. Instead, it was an advertising page that's filled with pop-up ads on money-earning schemes, online gambling, porn sites and other suspicious ads.
Three of these fake Facebook accounts were even placed under the names of the children of a victim who hails from West Australia.
One of these fake accounts had been set up under the name of Liam Sweeney, one of the plane crash victims. The page shows a link which promises the readers that it will lead them to the video clip of the crash event which took place in Ukraine. It further claims that everything was caught in a video camera. However, the link leads to a porn site when clicked.
Other victims that had been exploited in the scam include UK's Ben Pocock and Richard Mayne, Eugene Choo Jin Leong (pilot of Malaysia Airlines), Rob Ayley (UK-born New Zealander), and US' Quinn Lucas Schansman.
The pages have already been taken down by Facebook though goalshighlights.com, said to be the external site, is still going live. Records show that its registration is located in Bucharest, Romania in the year 2010. The ISP address leads to a source in the Netherlands.
The family of another MH17 victim, 6yrs old Noah Pozner, learned that there was a site that had been set up in memory of the child. The fake site purportedly encouraged donors to show their support to the family by sending donations to an address somewhere around Bronx, New York. It's a quick money earning scheme at the expense of the young victim.
These fraudsters would usually come up with a scheme after a tragic incident has occurred. The same method was used during the previous tragic events of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the Boston Marathon bombings which happened in 2012 and in April 2013 respectively.
Director Alastair MacGibbon of the University of Canberra's Centre for Internet Safety has expressed that these scams are now very common and normally occurs after a major disaster has happened. Users are therefore advised to be careful whenever they visit an unknown site. Otherwise, they can become vulnerable to annoying ads and malware attacks on their PC.
