Facebook Scam Has Already Claimed 21,000 Victims by Exploiting Steve Jobs’ Death

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Scammers have already taken to Facebook to exploit the death of Steve Jobs. PandaLabs has “detected a malicious link” on Facebook that was making the rounds earlier and claiming victims.

The page was called “R.I.P. Steve Jobs” and a link on the page claimed that 50 free iPads were being given away “in memory of Steve Jobs.” This was obviously a scam, but it seems that over 21,000 Facebook users have already been infected by the malware.

The page was shut down at 8:00 AM PDT this morning, and it’s unclear how many PC users were infected. Over 21,000 people clicked the link during a period of only 8 hours. The page apparently gained five new fans per second and ended up collecting over 90,000 fans before being pulled.

“Unfortunately, as soon as we learned of Steve Jobs’ death, we knew scammers would start to figure out how to exploit it,” said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs. “It is not unusual for cyber-crooks and fraudsters to take advantage of headline-grabbing events to spread their creations and affect the maximum number of victims possible in a short period of time.”

Only PC users would of course be susceptible to this malware. Mac users are fine. Thanks for that, Steve.

(via Electronista)

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