A scam obituary site
I attended a funeral recently for a family member. We weren’t close, so it didn’t hit me that hard, but some of the people I’m close to and care about were pretty devastated.
We posted the person’s official obituary to the site of the funeral home, and we were surprised when someone sent us a link to their obituary on a completely different site. It wasn’t the same text — in fact it was very clearly a fake one if you knew the person at all. It was filled with broad, vague, non-denominational platitudes which didn’t work for someone who was specifically and devoutly religious. It did, however, have some correct information that felt lifted from the valid one. If you didn’t know the person that well, then it read convincingly. Think “ChatGPT writes an obituary” vibes.
On the fake obituary, there were links to buy flowers, plant a tree, etc.
We requested that the site take it down, and they did quite promptly, but it was unnerving that it even existed in the first place. It feels like the site scrapes obituary listings, automatically rewrites them so they’re not identical, then publishes them without the knowledge or consent of the person’s families. It feels especially predatory because it’s scamming grieving people, and I very much doubt that the services that you can “buy” through the site are actually fulfilled.
I don’t have a point to this other than that I wanted to make people aware of it.
There was a news story about this recently.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-27/the-obit-piracy-scam/103633058
While I have no doubt that you are correct that the site scrapes "real" obituary sites and republishes the information, I am curious why you think that flower orders and such would not be fulfilled.
Given that the funeral information is likely quite easy to get hold of, and people "drop shipping" flowers to funerals being an extremely common practice, it seems like it would be a much better business strategy to just plug into both ends "legitimately" and actually get orders placed.
I could be wrong, and I didn’t save the fake obituary so I can’t go back and double check, but I believe some of the services they offered were not ones offered by the funeral home we used.
I guess it is possible that they could fulfill those through a third party though — I honestly didn’t consider the “drop shipping” or “unofficial middleman” angle. The fake obituary set off my scam alarm so I just assumed the whole thing was fraudulent.
I am vaguely involved in getting flowers for employees/ex-employees when deaths happen at my current company. Even if the funeral home doesn't offer services, getting flowers to funeral homes from public orders is very much a service that every flower shop offers. If local flower shops don't have public order systems, there are several services that operate that will figure out how to get flowers ordered or delivered for an upcharge.
It would be pretty easy to get hold of one of the big flower services and hook into their ordering system. It seems like adding about half a dozen too many middlemen to the equation to me, or at least used to. When you see the use case of a large company that needs to order flowers every week or two to any of hundreds of funeral homes and getting flowers from any of hundreds of florists, it makes sense to spend an extra $25 and not waste more time on it.
Good morning,
As part of my job I read hundreds of obituaries, and often need to search for them to track down surviving family members to pay a balance or issue a death benefit. There are many legitimate places to find obits, like newspapers or funeral home websites. Problem is these often charge by the word and folks don't want to shell out after dealing with the already great expense of someone dying.
Then there's places like Legacy who've had a lot of business outsourced to them from newspapers and the like - some of these ones were written by actual people but now we're also starting to get into AI generated stuff. Echovita is one of the sites that falls at the lower end of this category. Some of these sites have ways to submit new obits and others are simply scrapers with some extra ads or things tacked on to make a buck.
Then you have actual straight up spam. These are sites that just use garbage SEO to pick up on things that people are searching for (like an obit for someone who died in a car accident or something that might be a little newsworthy) and use them to help guide usually older folks to click on things that they shouldn't click on.
Here's an example of these example - note the weirdness in names and the discrepancies in the details you can see in the Google preview. These sites are just as scummy and predatory as any other scam / spam website out there. This was a real person who died and these sites are using that to try and trap people (again mostly older but not limited to) into clicking or downloading something they shouldn't.
Basically there's good and mediocre and bad just like everything else on the internet. I just happen to read a lot more obits as part of my work than most people probably have much reason to, so I get to see the spectrum a little more clearly.
I didn’t want to name/link to the site in the body of the text in case it needs to be removed, so I’m doing it here:
Echovita
Looks like you're not alone in experiencing this:
https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/143597755/echovita-powered-by-google
However it also looks like @DeaconBlue is correct in this not being an outright scam, even though the potentially scraped/auto-generated obituaries are a pretty unethical and misleading business practice, IMO. However, they do appear to actually arrange for flowers to be delivered to the funeral homes in question. Their trustpilot rating is pretty low though, so they clearly have some issues:
https://trustpilot.com/review/echovita.com