SAN JOSE (California) - MINUTES after any big celebrity dies, Internet swindlers get to work. They pump out specially created spam e-mails and throw up malicious Web sites to infect victims' computers, hoping to capitalise on the sudden high demand for information.

The scams started cropping up almost instantaneously as Jackson's death was still hitting the news. As days have gone by, they've gotten more sophisticated - and dangerous.

Jackson's death 'took a lot of people by surprise - the spammers, too,' said Dermot Harnett, principal analyst for anti-spam engineering at Symantec Corp, a security software maker.

Any major world event, such as the recent protests in Iran, triggers a barrage of Internet attacks. Security experts say the malicious traffic associated with Jackson's death will likely match and perhaps exceed those of other big spamming campaigns, such as those connected with the swine flu outbreak and Saddam Hussein's execution.

Spam is the most common way for fraudsters to find victims after these types of events. They can use a shotgun approach with a boilerplate message about Jackson, taking advantage of people's interests in the topic to improve their batting average over their usual spam campaigns.

By enticing users with such messages and tricking them into clicking on e-mail attachments, scammers can easily infect victims' computers and take command of them for more nefarious activities.

The spam about Jackson's death gets more convincing every day. One message promises a YouTube video showing the exclusive 'last work of Michael Jackson'. Instead, victims get a malicious program that steals their passwords. Another promises to show the 'latest unpublished photos' of Jackson if you click on a link - one that also tries to install a password-stealing program on your machine.

Others purport to be from legitimate news outlets and may contain accurate enough information to convince viewers they're real enough to click on. Others promise access to secret songs.

The effects of specific spam campaigns, like the one surrounding Jackson's death, are hard to quantify, though. Spam levels are already so high that there might not be a noticeable increase in overall spam levels, Mr Harnett said. By some estimates spam accounts for more than 90 per cent of all e-mail sent around the world, though the bulk of the messages get filtered out before ever reaching the user. -- AP