Alex Goldman

And like, how did you even find that person?

Because back in the day, I would have used the Whois lookup, but now I don't know what I'd do.

What did he tell you about the gig?

How does he set this up?

Did he tell you what kind of money he's making?

Who even is he?

So I guess my question is, like, the average person isn't going to get a ton of visits to their obituary.

So how are the people making these sites making money?

So initially, when Marcus reached out to us with this problem, he presented it as one of two things.

Either this was a lazy little nothing problem or a crazy bot farm syndicate.

Now we knew it wasn't a crazy bot farm syndicate, but it wasn't a lazy little nothing problem either.

Like so much of the other trash on the internet, we'd learned that this fake obituary scam is an AI-powered volume play.

The idea is to do as little work as possible to get as much attention as possible to earn as much money as possible from the online ad economy.

And that's more or less the end of the story.

Except it didn't really feel like the end of the story.

Because the longer I sat with this idea that these websites are bankrolled by ad dollars, the less it made sense to me.

Like, just thinking about the way I felt when I visited some of these websites certainly didn't put me in a buying kind of mood.

In fact, the experience of being there was actually pretty repellent.

which led me to ask a question that in all my years of reporting on the internet, I never even thought to ask.

Why would real companies spend real dollars to buy ads on fake websites?