I’m seriously weirded out right now browsing www.mydeathspace.com. The gist of the site is that it lists obituaries with links to the myspace pages of the decedents.
Right now I have a depressing, frightening inability to resist browsing this site. The worst is reading the comments on the pages: “We miss you so much!”, “Why did this happen to you?”, “Click here for a free Macy’s gift card!”, “You’re in our thoughts and prayers!”
There are also the chilling murder victim’s comments: “Where are you?!!! I’ve called you and texted you, and Ruth went by your house. What’s up? Let us know you’re okay, alright? Peace.” and “hey girl, just checkin’ to see if you’re alive! LOL -Danielle”
I don’t quite know what to think about it yet, but I just thought I’d share in time for halloween.
No, all the deaths logged on the site are (or were) people with MySpace accounts. If you look at the pictures in each obit, underneath you’ll see a link to the person’s MySpace page. I assume that the MyDeathSpace owner has to do all this manually; i can’t imagine it’s possible to write a script or a spider that will automatically understand when it comes across a MySpace page with a dead user (although i could be wrong about that).
Here is an article from Britain’s Guardian newspaper about the site.
What’s up with that? I’ve seen that comment posted on multiple MySpaces linked from that site, and it’s always posted by someone on the dead person’s friends list who had previously offered condolences.
Is it some kind of account hijack spam? Nobody can really be that tasteless, can they?
Then again, half of the people can’t be bothered to use punctuation or correctly spelled words (“theirs a whole in my heart”) in their MySpace eulogies, so I suppose it’s conceivable.
Hijack…
Here’s how that works. You are looking though someones comments and happen upon a Macy’s Gift card, or a Starbucks gift card, or some sort of video or SOMETHING that you need to click on. When you click on it, it takes you back to a login screen. You log on thinking something wonky happened that logged you out, but it doesn’t work and you give up.
The log on screen is fake (phishing) and it gives someone your name and password. From there they (a bot I’m sure) logs on to your account and puts those Macy’s cards (or what have you) on all your friends pages and it continues on from there. If ‘you’ start leaving those comments for other people all you have to do is change your password and it’ll stop.
So the moral of the story is, if you see ads, don’t click’em and if you do click on something and it makes you log on (It’ll say “You must be logged on to do that”) don’t log on, just hit back and tell the person that left the comment that they’ve been hacked and they need to change their password.
Also, in case you don’t know, you can only leave a message for someone if you are on their friend list, which is why you are noticing that they were only left by friends.
The problem — and this was one of the reasons I canceled my MySpace account — is that every freakin’ thing you try to do on that site throws up that damned login screen if you’ve been “inactive” for more than 15-20 minutes. It just becomes second nature to click the login button without thinking, which is exactly why this scam works.
