With tragedies such as what happened at Virginia Tech on Monday, there are always the scum that crawl out of the sewers to take advantage of the good will of others. In cases like this they register a domain name and then send spam attempting to fool people into going to the site and donating money to help the families of the victims. We saw this when Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi, and after the bombing of the Federal Center in Oklahoma City.

GoDaddy and other registrars are reporting a host of new registrations of domain names that relate to the tragedy at Virginia Tech. Many will prove to be valid attempts to support family and friends of victims and will not even ask for money. Others will certainly be those that want to make money through the suffering of others.

Also realize that it may be a phishing attempt to get personal information about yourself in preparation for identity theft. If you receive email, FAX, or phone attempts to get money from you supposedly in support of the victims of the massacre, please check out the organization closely first.

To learn more about phishing and related illicit activity, the following two links provide some very good information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing
http://www.antiphishing.org/

If you’re one of the idiots trying to profit from this, stop it. There are plenty of more legitimate ways to make money online. Don’t stoop to this level, take the high road to success.