17 July, 2014 was but a fateful day for the passengers who boarded the Malaysian Flight MH17; scheduled to fly from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The plane crashed during its flight over eastern Ukraine, ending the lives of 298 passengers including the crew. While people all over the world are offering their condolences to the departed, online scammers have yet again displayed their atrocious nature by using this tragic news as a bait to target the users of social media.
Recently, Malaysian Airlines revealed the names and nationalities of all the passengers who were aboard the flight. And not so long after this, online scammers started their inhumane campaign to trick users on Facebook. Reportedly, fake accounts and pages were created on the social networking site using the identities of the flight victims including children. Reportedly, these fake accounts shared links that claim to show live footage of how the MH17 crashed. However, as always, these links were fake and were only meant to redirect users to fraudulent or malicious websites. These accounts and pages are being taken down by Facebook as and when they are made aware of them.
Most of these fake links began with descriptions that read:
“Actual Footage Missile MH17.”
“Real Footage of MH17 Shot Down.”
“Video camera caught the moment plane MH17 crash over Ukraine. Watch here the video of crash.”
Readers are strongly advised to be careful of any social media posts or pages that talk about the MH17 incident. While there may be some genuine Facebook pages for people to visit and offer condolences, the fake ones are sure to be more in number.
This is not the first time that online scammers have taken advantage of incidents that are bound to shake human emotions. And rest assured, this won’t be their last either. To add to this distasteful news, it has also been reported that credit cards, besides other belongings of the perished victims were stolen from the crash site. You can read more on this here.
Data Source:
www.telegraph.co.uk
www.mashable.com