Some scammers are trying make big bucks from all the Steve Jobs buzz online. Computer anti-virus firm Sophos has revealed that online scammers are offering Facebook users a bogus offer for free Apple iPads, and directing them to gambling and survey websites.
“The link goes through the bit.ly short url service (we have asked our friends at bit.ly to shut the link down) and we can see that over 15,000 people have already clicked on the link which was set up within hours of Steve Jobs’s death first being announced,” said Graham Cluley, a researcher with Sophos.
“The scammers profit when users click on the links, and get commissions based on the amount of traffic they bring to the websites,” he adds.
The scam message says, “In the memory of Steve Jobs, a company is giving away free iPads,” followed by a link which asks users to register for free Apple Inc products, then requesting them to complete online surveys or enter gambling sites.
here are going to be lot of other cases of online scams. For instance, scammers could easily exploit Steve Jobs fans that are grieving his death by asking them for donation with messages like, “Donate to Steve’s favorite charity as a tribute”.
“If you do want to pay tribute to Steve Jobs, the most appropriate place it seems to me would be Apple’s website itself. The truth is that the scammers are not geniuses like Jobs, and they don’t contribute anything to the world of technology or wider society as Steve Jobs did. It’s a shame that they can’t be inspired by speeches like the one Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005, and make something better of their lives,” Cluley adds.
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