A tasteless Angelina Jolie death hoax reportedly circulated around Facebook on Thursday night.
David Emery, who reports on urban legends and hoaxes for About.com, said that the Angelina Jolie death hoax is actually a rogue app that tries to trick Facebook users into allowing it to access their account.
The Jolie death hoax looks like a regular link to a video complete with a thumbnail image. It will say something like, “The Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie was pronounced dead on August 23, 2013 after her second major operation.”
The hoax Emery found said that Jolie left behind a video message for her fans on the Hollywood Access entertainment news site. However, when the person clicks the link, they will not visit the nonexistent video. Instead, the rogue will presumably get access to their Facebook account.
As far as I know, the hoax wasn’t a big deal on Twitter. But I have seen one tweet that carried almost the same message that Emery saw on Facebook.
I wasn’t about to click that link and see where it led.
Emery also advised strongly against clicking any links to articles or videos about Jolie’s death.
Zeibiz said that a Facebook page called RIP Angelina Jolie was created on Thursday with the same claim. According to their report, the page had over one million likes. It has since been removed.
It isn’t clear if the page was created with fake likes to make it look more legitimate. But it seems likely.
As E! Online reported, 38-year-old Angelina Jolie is anything but dead. In fact, she’s making herself visible as she speaks out about the Syrian crisis and its tragic impact on children.
On Friday — the day after the death hoax said she died — Angelina Jolie came forward to ask for world leaders to help the one million Syrian children now living as refugees as a result of the ongoing civil war in that nation.
[Angelina Jolie photo by Featureflash / Shutterstock.com ]
