Scam: Fake Steve Jobs Charitable Foundation

If you received an email from “Steve Jobs Charitable Foundation”, it is a scam. The email, written in poor English, asked for donation to help young webcoders. There is no such “charity”.

Other scams in the past 2 – 3 weeks after his death includes a advertisement about giving away free iPads in memory of Steve Jobs. However, if you click on the link then you’ll be asked to fill in online surveys to qualify for one of the free iPads. The objective of the scam is to exploit the event to drive traffic to the website.

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“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.”

These scams work by tricking users into visiting websites where they are told they have won a valuable prize, such as an iPad, an iPhone or TV set. Obviously, the unsuspecting victim will never get the prize, but rather a series of costly spam SMS messages. In addition, malicious websites like these leverage geo-location data to display messages in different languages depending on the user’s location.

The URL shortening service used in the scam seems to indicate this is the same malicious webpage used in similar attacks around the anticipated launch of the iPhone 5 and the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.