“Lady Gaga found dead in hotel room” is a scam

If you’ve recently noticed links on Facebook or Twitter about the death of Lady Gaga in a hotel room, don’t start panicking – she’s not dead. However some scammers have decided to use her fame as a way to spread a new scam. Clicking on the link lands you on a Facebook page which asks you to “Pay With A Tweet” (a legitimate app that grants you access to stuff online by just sending a Tweet about it) in order to watch a video about her death.

However, once you send a Tweet to spread the word, you get a link to watch the video. And if you haven’t caught on by now, this is the part where the link is supposed to lead you to an unsafe site or a malicious app disguised as a video player. Fortunately for people who were fooled into clicking the link, the page that’s hosting the malicious content is down. However, some damage has been done when word about the link was spread through the “Tweet payment”.

This isn’t the first time scams have been marketed around the death of someone well-known, and it definitely isn’t going to be the last. But for those of you who are uninformed – never trust links to pages/sites you don’t know, even if they’re from your friends. News this big, if true, will eventually find its way out to a major news site – don’t click on links that claim to have never seen before footage etc. Not all scams have broken links.

George Wong
Categories: Web
Tags: Facebook, lady gaga, Malware, scam, Security