The passing of the great man who revolutionized technology and the way we see it, has been a great opportunity for scammers to make some money. A new Facebook hoax promises unsuspecting members a free iPad given out by Apple in the memory of Steve Jobs.
The link, that used a
bit.ly URL service, was shut down thanks to
Graham Cluley who made sure no one else would fall for the hoax, but apparently it was already too late for 15,000 people who've already accessed the hyperlink and filled the pockets of the cybercriminals.
The condition for winning the iPad was for the customer to complete a survey, so once the link contained in the post was clicked, the victim was taken to a well-known online inquiry, that also appeared in our
Olive Garden post a while back.
As I've mentioned then, the survey site changes its presentation language according to your location and Mr. Cluley proved this as by being in Barcelona, Spain, the study site appeared to him written in Spanish.
Even though this variant of the hoax doesn't spread any malicious viruses, it wouldn't be too hard to replace the harmless page with one that “hands out”
ZeuS bank account-stealing Trojans.
In this case, the masterminds behind the scheme earn a hefty profit as these poll pages pay them to redirect internet traffic towards the site.
Imagine! Steve Jobs barely passed to the other side and hackers already made a hefty profit.
The importance of these articles is to alert internauts not to click on these scam posts, mainly because they can contain malware that will infect your device and on the other hand, why help crooks get rich.
Facebook started
implementing some protective measures against illegal links, but because in some of the cases these are legitimate websites that don't do anything bad but interview people, they'll not be detected as malevolent.
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