SCAM -'R.I.P. Dwayne Johnson' - The Rock is NOT Dead

Outline

R.I.P. message being distributed on Facebook claims that actor Dwayne Johnson has died during filming of a dangerous stunt for the movie Fast and Furious 7.

© Depositphotos.com/ s_bukley

Brief Analysis
The message is a scam. Dwayne Johnson is alive and well. The link in the message takes users to a fake Facebook page that tries to trick them into participating in suspect online surveys and installing rogue apps or malicious browser extensions. If this scam message comes your way, do not click any links that it contains.

Example

R.I.P. DWAYNE JOHNSON (1972 -2014). He died filming a dangerous stunt for FAST & FURIOUS 7
Age Restricted Video (for 18 years and above only)

Detailed Analysis
According to a message currently going viral on Facebook, actor Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson has died during filming for the movie Fast and Furious 7. The R.I.P. message, which features a photograph of Dwayne, claims that the star died while performing a dangerous movie stunt. The message invites users to click the image to see a video of the accident.

However, the message is a scam. Dwayne Johnson is alive and well. Clicking the message takes users to a bogus Facebook Page that supposedly hosts the accident video. But, when they attempt to play the video, users are told that they must first share the message on Facebook. Via this mechanism, the scammers ensure that their bogus message reaches a wide audience and continues to circulate.

After sharing as instructed, users will be taken to another page that again supposedly hosts the video. But, users will now be told that they must perform further actions before they can see the video. They may be told that they must fill in one or more surveys, ostensibly to verify their age or show that they are human. Or, they may be asked to install rogue apps that will send out spam and scam messages to all of their friends. In some instances, users may be tricked into adding malicious extensions to their web browsers or downloading malware. But, even if they obey all of the instructions on the scam pages, users 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.

This scam follows closely behind another circulating message that falsely claimed that Dwayne Johnson had fallen off a cliff and died while filming in New Zealand. Unlike the version discussed here, this earlier message was a relatively harmless hoax and did not contain links to malicious websites.