Fake Dwayne Johnson Death Posts Open Scam Websites
The original site is no longer online; links go to the Internet Archive copy.
What the fact-checkers found
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According to various posts that are circulating via social media, actor Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson has died during a stunt gone wrong.
Some versions claim that the star was working on a Fast and Furious movie at the time of the accident. The posts invite users to click to see a video of the accident.
However, the claims in the posts are untrue. Dwayne Johnson is alive and well.
Clicking the message takes you to a fraudulent web page that is designed to look like a news report.
If you attempt to play the video on the page, you may see a pop-up message claiming that your computer has been infected by viruses. The message will urge you to call a support number to get help with the supposed virus infection. However, there is no virus infection.
In fact, the message is a typical browser tech support scam designed to trick you into allowing criminals to take control of your computer and install malware. The criminals will also try to trick you into divulging your credit card details, ostensibly to pay for their assistance.
In other cases, you may be told that you must share the page and fill in various surveys before you will be allowed to view the video. These are survey scams designed to trick you into supplying your personal information to unscrupulous online marketing companies.
In some instances, you may be tricked into adding malicious extensions to your web browser or downloading malware.
But, even if you obey all of the instructions on the scam pages, you will never get to see the promised video, which never existed to begin with.
Such celebrity death scams are a very common scammer ruse. Be wary of any message that claims that a celebrity has died and invites you to click a link to watch a video or read a news report. The death of a celebrity is always widely reported by the mainstream media, so a quick check of a news portal such as Google News should reveal if a circulating death story is true or false.
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