In the United States, fake obituaries have been attracting a lot of attention lately. A Los Angeles Times reporter recently discovered a series of obituaries about her circulating online after she began receiving calls from concerned loved ones. So she decided to publish a lengthy article about the terrifying phenomenon of the growing online activity of so-called “obituary pirates.” If you try to search for the term in Polish, you won’t find much information, but in English-speaking countries, this type of fraud is slowly becoming a more widely discussed phenomenon, and not just on Internet forums.
Fabricated Death Notices
“Obituary pirates” search the Internet for information about the deaths of “regular” people, i.e. people who are not celebrities. The goal of the scammers is to create and publish their own articles about the deaths of these people – in the hope of generating clicks via search engines when the deceased are “Googled” by their friends, acquaintances and relatives.
The number of searches in individual cases is usually rather low, writes the digital economy platform OMR. However, it is not about searches. Such fake death notices are often placed on various websites, thanks to which money can be made from fraud, for example through online advertising. Such ads are placed on portals containing death notices and – whether we like it or not – they always play automatically, and the money for them goes to, among others, fraudsters.
“Obituary pirates” also take advantage of the fact that this type of content on the Internet can be easily and quickly generated using artificial intelligence (AI). The AI summarizes the information available online about the deceased, collects photos on social media, and then spits out new content, which is then published on the Internet. The fatal thing about all this is not only that death notices are misused for purely commercial purposes, i.e. as an environment for online advertising, but also that the AI in many cases simply “makes up” and generates incorrect information.
Living people presumed dead
For example, there was a recent high-profile case of a deceased woman whose ex-partner was also declared dead in fake obituaries. Or the tragic accident of a young man who was hit by a train in New York. In fake, and probably AI-generated, content, the accidental death was presented as murder, which attracted a lot of attention – and therefore a lot of clicks on the Internet.
The scammers are creating not only texts, but even videos. As the journalist from Los Angeles writes, searching through all the content about her alleged death, she was almost in mourning herself. Fortunately, the content generated by AI is, at least for now, written quite clumsily. This allows you to recognize that it is not authentic.
As the journalist states in the article, even with the help of IT specialists, she was unable to figure out why her death was reported at all. In this very high-profile case, the false content was quickly removed. However, other, lesser-known people continue to fall victim to this fraud, which is still being perpetrated by unknown perpetrators operating most likely outside the United States.
The OMR platform has already cited several examples of fake death notices, and its members believe that the phenomenon is taking on “unprecedented proportions” thanks to the new possibilities offered by AI.
Source: Stern