LONDON - The names and photos of MH17 plane crash victims, including Malaysian pilot Eugene Choo Jin Leong, are being exploited by online scammers who have set up fake Facebook tribute pages to drive traffic to a dodgy external website.
The Facebook pages, created on the day the plane crashed, baited people to click on another website with a link purporting to show footage of the MH17 disaster.
The link read: ‘Video Camera Caught the moment plane MH17 Crash over Ukraine.Watch here the video of Crash.’
Victims targeted by the scam include young Perth siblings Otis, Evie and Mo Maslin, Canberra woman Liliane Derden and Fatima Dyczynski, who was born in Germany but was on flight MH17 because she was moving to Perth.
The scam also exploited the names of victims from other countries, including Quinn Lucas Schansman from the US, British-born Kiwi Rob Ayley, Malaysia Airlines pilot Eugene Choo Jin Leong and Richard Mayne, Ben Pocock and Liam Sweeney from the UK.
Facebook has taken down the pages but the external site goalshighlights.com remains live. It was registered in Bucharest, Romania in 2010 and the ISP address tracks back to the Netherlands.
Ken Gamble, chairman of the Australian chapter of the International Association of Cybercrime Prevention, said it looked like the website had been hacked in order to divert to adult hook up websites and others selling counterfeit drugs.
“I’ve seen this quite a lot, hackers get in, take control of a site and they then divert to a stack of stuff and use the bandwidth of this guy’s website for illegal purpose sometimes or for getting the hits up on certain sites,” Gamble said.
He added that the websites that goalshighlights.com diverted to contained malicious files that would infect a user’s computer if clicked on.
Gamble added that fraudsters often capitalised on disasters like the MH17 crash.
“When a disaster like this happens, it’s a great opportunity for all sorts of scammers,” Gamble told Daily Mail Australia.
“Everybody is out there looking for information at the moment, everyone wants to know more about what has happened.
“It’s a great opportunity to prey on people’s vulnerabilities and emotion is the greatest one.”
Scammers aim to lure a portion of the high amount of internet traffic going to websites with MH17 information, Gamble said.
“Some people will be using it for an opportunity to market their sites, it’s a good way to bring a massive amount of traffic to someone’s site,” he said.
“Other offenders will be doing this for more sinister purposes.”
Before the Facebook pages were removed, users expressed outrage, labelling them “disgusting” and the person who created them as “sicko”.
– UK Daily Mail
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