Since President Obama’s announcement of the death of Osama Bin Laden, Facebook has exploded with pages, status updates and scams galore.

At the forefront of the masses is the ‘Osama Bin Laden is DEAD’ page with over 400,000 ‘likes’. The rapid increases by the minute in likes and wall posts are a true testimony to the power of social media and how easily we all interact via Facebook. Strangely enough, the page was set up before the official death announcement.  If you check the page’s Info, it reads:  “Osama Bin Laden has not been found and will never be found because he died a long time ago…Just remember, its impossible to find a dead person.” This theory seems to be irrelevant to the thousands of people using the wall to post news updates, photos, debates and general excitement over the world’s most notorious terrorist’s end.

Be wary that competing with these posts is a never-ending string of scams, spam and malware. The circulation of these scams and hoaxes has grown exponentially in the past week. Within hours of the official announcement, we saw a gruesome image of a man’s head claiming to be the dead Osama Bin Laden circulated that was proven not to be real and several videos claiming to be the official death. In the past week, countless more have appeared.

Be careful of all links to photos or videos concerning Bin Laden and his death. If you are certain a post is spam, click the ‘x’ in the corner of the post which will give you the option to ‘Mark as Spam’ or ‘Report Abuse’. Please trust only those links that come from verified news agencies to avoid these scams and those that appear in the future.