Online scumbags wasted little time in latching onto the untimely death of singer Amy Winehouse as a lure for survey scams on Facebook. Bogus messages supposedly offering footage of Winehouse smoking crack hours before her death of a suspected drug overdose on Saturday actually lead to pointless surveys that make money for …

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Monday 25th July 2011 10:55 GMT alain williams

Why ...

is this sort of scam news ? -- unfortunately parasitic bastards are only interested in themselves.

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Monday 25th July 2011 11:12 GMT Thomas 4

I'd like to congratulate El Reg

....on being perhaps the only news organ in the world not to have spent pages and pages lambasting Amy Winehouse as a drug addicted social wreckage, before making the mother of all U-turns and painting her as a beautiful delicate flower whose life tragically cut short.

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1. Monday 25th July 2011 13:06 GMT MarkieMark1
  
  Be Fair
  
  she was both; the tragedy is that no-one was apparently capable of making her change her course before the final curtain
  
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  1. Monday 25th July 2011 14:40 GMT schnide
    
    Hmm, well..
    
    Capable of making her change course..? Ultimately, I think it was down to her. No-one forced her to become a crack addict, and it's not like she didn't have people around her who tried to get her clean (although I'm sure she had at least as much opposition in the other direction).
    
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Monday 25th July 2011 11:57 GMT Anonymous Coward

Ghouls

It's interesting that these scams always play on the ghoulish tendencies of their marks. What well adjusted person feels the need to watch Winehouse smoking crack or CCTV footage of the Oslo explosion?

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1. Monday 25th July 2011 12:51 GMT A J Stiles
  
  Appeals to Baser Instincts
  
  All the most successful scams are appeals to people's baser instincts. People are less likely to complain that something claiming to be a link to images of Amy Winehouse smoking crack isn't what it seems, than something claiming to be a link to pictures of fluffy kittens.
  
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Monday 25th July 2011 16:02 GMT countd

News angle?

I love you, El Reg, I really do, but this bullshit where you take a major news event that is inevitably picked up by s{c,p}ammers and parlay that in itself as being actual news is rather tiresome.

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1. Tuesday 26th July 2011 09:24 GMT Sulehir
  
  RE: "News angle?..."
  
  I disagree. I already know about the bombing shooting and celebrity death from dozens of sources and it has no major relevance on a tech site. A heads up that the scammers are already using this vector on the other hand lets me keep my less tech savvy friends and family from doing something stupid.
  
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