Jackie Chan's Death Hoax Continues to Proliferate on Facebook
The scheme of fallaciously advertising or spreading the news of a popular entertainer has taken social networks by storm for many years now. It comes to us as no surprise to discover that the old social networking hoax spread throughout Facebook falsely claiming that Jackie Chan has met his demise has literally received new life almost to the point of becoming viral.
Jackie Chan is known to many as a popular actor and martial artist who has made many accomplishments in life. Being that he appears to live on the edge in some of his Hollywood blockbuster movies, it would not come as a complete shocker to discover that he was hurt or even killed on the set of one of his films. Of course, it would naturally be a shock to hear of such unfortunate news regardless of the every-day dangers he may face in acting out some of his risky Hollywood stunts. Fortunately for him, he is still alive today while there is a proliferation of hoaxes still circulating on Facebook of him dying.
The Jackie Chan death hoax initiated on Facebook after it made the rounds on Twitter several months ago. Many of the links have been sourced to malicious sites or phishing sites designed to extract personal information from computer users. The image below in Figure 1 is an actual example of the Facebook hoax spreading on a Facebook friend's news feed where the user ends up on a 3rd part Facebook app asking permission to access their profile. Granting permission to the potentially malicious app can lead to stealing personal information or a malicious site.
Figure 1. Jackie Chan Death Facebook Hoax message leading to dangerous 3rd party Facebook app
It is just about every day that we see some type of hoax claiming that someone famous has died. You can say that Facebook tends to kill off Jackie Chan almost every day as the hoax perpetuates through a known Facebook scheme that attempts to get permission from Facebook friends to view the claimed news story. Most times, the Jackie Chan death hoax comes from a flagrant Facebook page designed to be passed off as a 'Hollywood Breaking News' source. These Facebook pages are created all the time but eventually get shut down after Facebook's security getting wind of it spreading faux news through a scamming friend-to-friend continuance.
In the unfortunate event that someone popular does pass away, the hackers and cybercrooks behind these death hoaxes ramp up their efforts to take adventive of the legitimate news. They will send out blasts through Facebook and other popular social networks with twists to the story. As a prime example, just after the death of Steve Jobs, hackers took to the time vacuums that we know as Facebook and Twitter to spread offers for a free iPad in memory of the late Jobs. If that doesn't scream SCAM, then we don't know what does.
The takeaway from Hoaxes like Jackie Chan dying is to suspect suspicion in everything. It is unfortunate that we must never initially give into what we see on Facebook or any other social avenue on the Internet. Additionally, it would be prudent to avoid giving permission to any 3rd party Facebook app rooting off of such a Hoax. Your good friend Google.com is there to allow you to check your sources and see if Jackie Chan is still alive or not.