A scam campaign has hit Facebook with a familiar click-jacking underlying theme: the death of a person. Although, the entitled posts don’t solicit a particular celebrity they do entice users of the social media site to click a link reading “Girl-Killed-Herself-on-Halloween-After-Dad-Posted-This-on-Her-Wall.” The posts are getting a lot of traction currently and should be avoided as they’re a nasty hoax and not a video.

The news has already appeared on Sophos Naked Security blog and About.com’s Urbanlegends, here’s what the Facebook post would look like:

Instead of leading to an actual video of gristly demise, the link takes users to a third-party site that contains advertisements and a Facebook sharing app. The sharing button then asks users to share the link with their friends before getting to view the video—of course, most people wouldn’t allow an app access to their account to share a link before they received the content of the link. However, due to human curiosity, this hasn’t stopped a great deal of people from spreading the link far and wide.

If you see this thumbnail and scam on Facebook, don’t click the link. If you’ve already shared it delete it from your pages and feed so that your friends don’t have to see it. It’s up to us to have the social responsibility to clean up after ourselves and remove scams like this from social media (especially if we’ve unwittingly participated.)

No need to feel embarrassed, humans are social animals and we love sharing, this is why Facebook and Twitter are such powerful devices of communication. With our attention, they can also be self-correcting and getting rid of this sort of litter will make our experience a cleaner place. So, let your friends know why you removed the link, and warn them if you seem them sharing it as well.

Fortunately, the scam is viral only in the social sense; there have been no reports that it infects with malware. It’s just bad taste adding coin to some malicious individual’s coffers via referrer and advertisement impressions on the site that purports to have the video.

Rubbing salt in the wound, the thumbnail used by the scammer of the “suicide victim” is the image of a real woman: Neda Agha-Soltan, whose shooting-death was captured on video during the Iranian election protests of 2009. (Thanks to About.com Urbanlegends for pointing that out.)

With Halloween just behind us, and today being Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) it’s a grim reminder that humanity is deeply fascinated by death. Scammers and malware developers know this and use it to spread their infernal devices and they leverage celebrity deaths and fear of death to do it. In the past we’ve seen the death of bin Ladin, Amy Winehouse, and others leveraged to these ends. We’ve even witnessed scammers use Steve Jobs’ untimely death as a foot-in-the-door via social media.

So keep your guard up.

Happy Halloween.