An LA reporter read her own obituary. She's just one victim of a broader death hoax scam
Do some checking to make sure an online obituary is legitimate and the person actually died – or that it's not a fake obituary for you.
That's because scammers are using AI-generated fake obituaries to try to get at lucrative ad revenue in a new scheme reported by CNN.
A Los Angeles Times reporter, Deborah Vankin, read her own obituary and watched "news anchors" in an accompanying video discuss her untimely death, CNN reported.
"Without her knowledge, Vankin had become the latest victim of scammers who fabricate death announcements to get clicks and ad revenue," the CNN story said. "Some of the so-called 'obituary pirates' are turning to AI to create death announcements padded with key words for Google searches, spreading alarm and misinformation, experts said."
An 'oldie but goodie' scam with a modern twist
Death-related scams have been around for ages, but they've usually involved criminals impersonating funeral home personnel to get cash from grieving families, Joshua Klopfenstein, co-founder of Lindenwood Marketing, which offers digital services to funeral homes, told CNN.
The fake obit scams are different because they're not targeting the supposed "dead" person, or their loved ones, for money, but they're writing fake obituaries for people with potentially high-traffic searchable names in order to rack up clicks to earn ad revenue, Chris Pierson, CEO of BlackCloak, an Orlando, Florida-based cybersecurity firm, told USA TODAY.
The scam is an "oldie but goodie" with a modern twist, said Pierson. In the early 2000s, "click farm" scams emerged, involving large groups of low-paid workers whose job was to click on links to make fraudsters money, Pierson said. Around 2010, those schemes lost popularity as they weren't as lucrative, he said.
"Now with the emergence of artificial intelligence, or at least more behavioral learning technologies, it doesn't surprise me at all that they're trying to use similar clicking types of approaches," Pierson said.
The "victim" is the network of buyers that place ads on various platforms, said Pierson.
There's nothing a person can do to protect themselves from an "obituary pirate" since there is a lot of leaked personal information on the web, he said. Scammers may target people of a certain age who may be more likely to have died but they can write a fake obituary on anyone, he said.
So far, the fake obituaries haven't targeted major celebrities, but Pierson, whose firm specializes in cybersecurity protection for high-net worth individuals, said that could change.
Celebrity obituaries published by mistake have highlighted the potential windfall would be scammers can receive. There are often a lot of clicks,'' Pierson said. So if a fake obituary with a popular celebrity's name goes up, "people are drawn to it. They click on it, (the scammers) get money for setting it up quickly. Even if it's only up for five hours, they have money for all the clicks that are coming out of that.
"There is big business there. Scammers know it. And if they haven't started, I would expect them to do so soon," Pierson said.
How does the fake obituary scam work?
Clickbait obituaries like Vankin’s are a sophisticated twist fueled by the popularity and proliferation of low-quality, AI-generated content, Klopfenstein told CNN.
The obits are posted on sites that publish a continuous stream of unrelated articles on random topics. They don’t contain much information, but are filled with key words to capitalize on what people are searching for on Google, CNN said.
Earlier this year, obituary pirates spread false information about Matthew Sachman, who died in an accident on New York City subway tracks. Scammers flooded search results with hoax obituaries, including one claiming that he was stabbed to death, CNN said, according to a New York Times report.
The paper traced one origin of the false reports to an internet marketer in India. He told reporters that he doesn’t know Sachman, but monitors Google trends data for words like “obituary,” “accident” and “death,” and uses an AI tool to create a blog post that generates a few cents a month in ad revenue.
Google makes security changes
Earlier this month, Google announced in a blog post that it was making key changes to improve the quality of its search engine and fighting against fraud by "tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search."
"We've long had policies and automated systems to fight against spammers, and we work to address emerging tactics that look to game our results with low-quality content," Google said.
Improvements will include updated ranking systems to "reduce unhelpful, unoriginal content" and taking action on what it called "manipulative behaviors" to use "automation to generate low-quality or unoriginal content at scale with the goal of manipulating search rankings."
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In a statement provided to USA TODAY, a Google spokesperson also said: “With our recent updates to our search spam policies, we’ve significantly reduced the presence of obituary spam in search results. On YouTube, we fight this content by rigorously enforcing our spam, deceptive practices, and scams policies.”
Most of the hoax obituaries for Vankin and Vastag no longer show up in searches after Google enacted its new spam policy, CNN said.
Betty Lin-Fisher is a consumer reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at [email protected] or follow her on X, Facebook or Instagram @blinfisher. Sign up for our free The Daily Money newsletter, which will include consumer news on Fridays, here.