Opera is not letting me comment here.

Do these lowlife have to play on people's emotions like that? what if it were their families involved? I hope this shit comes back and bites them in the ass.

Man, that's just f'ked up, plain and simple.

What will they do once the shoe is on the other foot I wonder. Somewhere along the line someone will get wise and find a way to exploit them!

The same is true with political parties right around the world.... some members can be tarred with the same brush but not all.  Despite my usual derogatory statements about politicians, which are generally tongue-in-cheek, I have met genuine politicians in my time... from both sides of the Aussie political fence.  I can also say that I've met some [probably a majority] who seem totally unconcerned with the struggles of ordinary folk and are disingenuous toward anyone they consider below their station... again, on both sides of the political fence.

With regard to the scammers/malware proliferators in this instance, any instance, castration is too good for them... but it'd be a start until we could decide what to really do with them.

With my ex-civics-prof hat on, I completely agree; data to support the point about nobody having a monopoly on corruption is copious. My partisan opinion is less charitable about the GOP because I believe our party has more members who believe public service is an honorable career path, while a dominant faction of the GOP seem to want public service limited to uniformed/armed jobs like cops, firefighters, and soldiers. But all that aspirational prose sticks in my throat a bit when I think of people like Charlie Rangel.

Re "normal people never think" of stuff like this, I trust you weren't meaning to call the folks at trendmicro.com sociopaths. There's definitely a middle ground there for cops, 'security' consultants, & military folks who need to be able to think like villains to deal with what real villains are doing.

Well, my thinking started with Mr. Reagan telling us that "government is the problem" and has lately involved worrying about a few new GOP governors who might well end up giving the larger party more than a bit of political indigestion. Two of them have Scott for a first or last name.

Struggling to get back on topic...Down here in Florida, many of us are very serious about our response to natural disasters. I've privately heckled DrJ for 'cluttering' the Stardock game sites I visit with so many scraps from the IT biz scene. Even though I (rashly?) assume that a solid majorirty of Stardock visitors would already behave as the OP advises, this sort of notice is worth the noise factor for the rest of us if it helps even a few people avoid having their desire to help others used to make money for crooks.

If I read the OP right the sites were put up to spread viruses as opposed to fraudulent collections.  Makes sense in a twisted sort of way.  If you want to spread viruses put them out there in a way that will get a lot of hits.  That is after all what these guys do, and spreading viruses is hardly a mission high on the ethics scale.

I guess my point is that we can probably expect to see these techniques repeated in the future for other major news stories.  (It's probably happened in the past as well, Trendmicro obviously knew to look for it.)

Forewarned and all that.

It's not exclusive to politicians, either... bankers, CEO's and everyday people fit into the greed, dishonesty and stupidity categories.

Something to do with human nature, I'm told... that some people cannot resist their worst urges.

The thing is, I find these scammers, hackers and malware proliferators far worse than any politician or banker.  With the latter it's business as usual and you can sort of understand it.... but with the majority of malware writers, there is no rhyme or reason behind it, other than they can and figure being a major pain in the ass is clever.

Aye, Cap'n, peel their feet and salt 'em, I sez!

Just a heads up here

I just clicked on a couple of Yahoo News link about the earthquake in Japan and dialog boxes came up wanting to know if I wanted to install an application/browser addon I'd never seen or heard of before... no actual name just a bunch of letters and numbers [AN 30 something or other]

This dialog does not appear when I click on any other Yahoo links, just ones concerned with the earthquake, so I was very suspicious and shut them down the instant they appeared. 

Anyhow, folks, be careful, it might be harmless, but with the various bastards out there it's probably not worth the risk to find out what it does should you also see it.

I'd hazard a guess that Yahoo is not behind this 'request' to add junk to peoples PC's.... because it's not something they've done in the past, at least to my knowledge.

That's exactly it, for some, there are no depths to which they will not sink, no level of depravity they will not visit.