Scammers are using the plight of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 to create fake web links for profit.

"[Shocking Video] Malaysian Airlines missing flight MH370 found in Sea."


"Malaysian Airlines missing flight MH370 found in Sea - 50 people alive saved."

"CNN UPDATE [Breaking]Malaysian Airplane MH370 Already Found. Shocking Video"

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These are just three examples. "We first saw the links spreading on Twitter," Chris Boyd, a malware intelligence analyst at Malwarebytes. told Wired.co.uk. "[They were] a mixture of tweets leading to known sites originally posted to Facebook and a new batch of spamblogs, survey scams [and] imitation news sites."

The technique is by no means new, but that does not make it any less harmful.


Boyd says he has tracked hundreds of similar scams related to the Japanese Tsunami of 2011 and last year's earthquake in the Philippines. "They ranged from Malware and 419 scams to fake donation pages and search engine poisoning," Boyd tells Wired.co.uk. "Anything involving a potential disaster is big money for the scammers, as there's a split between clickers with a penchant for salacious content and those who simply want to know if a relative is okay or if there's any more news on a breaking disaster."

The scam artists tend to profit from the fake surveys that appear if users follow the links, after being encouraged to share the video or "news story" on Facebook.


In a blog post Boyd explains how the public is being drawn in with buttons that ask them to share a "Pray for MH370" group page on Facebook. "This is because the fake video sites are most commonly made to look like Facebook pages," he says, "which means potential clickers feel more comfortable with what they are seeing."

Some links lead users to realistic looking news sites, where the user must click "share" before viewing the video.

Any user that fills out associated surveys will be sharing personal information with third party marketers the scammers sell on the information to. "Popular fake scam pages can be shared hundreds of thousands of times, and there's big money in it for anybody willing to plumb the depths of human misery," says Boyd. "There have also been cases of survey networks serving up malware files, so these scams are never quite as straightforward as they seem."