This was interesting as recently my mom was telling me how she saw a video online that stated the actor Michael J Fox had passed away. That was odd as I would expect social media sites to be flooded with news about it if that was the case. Then the next day she told me again how another celebrity passed away. This was suspicious as again there was no news about it. So I asked her to show me what she saw.
It turned out while she was browsing YouTube she would get all these videos with titled that imply something bad has happened to a celebrity. The channel’s name also has the word “deceased” in it and so anyone just glimpsing at that plus the video title would assume the celebrity has passed away to then click on the video to learn more. By the looks of it, that is the intent as I would imagine they generate money this way.
Out of curiosity I just quickly researched the topic of celebrity deaths and apparently it’s big business for someone people. However, in a lot of cases they are used to lure people to click on ads to then hopefully trick them into providing site login credentials which would compromise their personal data or to input payment information. Almost like a typical telemarketing scam.
They use traditional headline and click baiting techniques I guess you could say that works on many people. So you got to keep an eye out for these types of scams as well.