MemorialSuite reference

Fake obituary scams: how they work, and how to check a memorial page is real

When someone dies, a great many people search for their name at once, over a few days, and then stop. That burst of attention can be sold, and there is now a small industry built on selling it. This page sets out what the practice actually looks like, how to tell a real memorial page from an imitation, and what to do if you find one. It is written for families, and journalists are welcome to use it.

We have an obvious interest in the subject, so it is worth stating ours plainly at the start: MemorialSuite publishes nothing online. There is no memorial page of ours to find, share or copy. That is explained further down, along with why we think it makes the comparison worth reading rather than worth discounting.

What is actually happening

These are distinct practices with distinct motives, and they are often confused with one another in conversation. Only some of them are fraud; the rest are merely grim.

1. The notice is copied onto a site nobody in the family chose

A death notice written for a funeral home or a newspaper turns up, sometimes within hours, on an unrelated website with a generic name. The text is recognisably the family's own, occasionally reworded. Beside it are flowers, candles, memorial trees, or a tribute video for sale.

Who pays for it: Advertising, and those upsells. The page exists because the person's name is being searched for that week.

Google named obituary spam directly when it announced new spam policies, saying it was “updating our spam policies to keep the lowest-quality content out of Search, like expired websites repurposed as spam repositories by new owners and obituary spam.” Google, 5 March 2024.

2. A short social media post is inflated into a long, confident, wrong obituary

A few lines posted by a friend become several hundred words of fluent prose containing details nobody supplied. Middle names, ages and causes of death are frequently wrong.

Who pays for it: Advertising on high-volume, low-quality content sites.

WKYT reported that Brett Tinch found several fake obituaries for his 18-year-old son Noah, one of which listed him as 32 and another with the middle name wrong. Secureworks researchers traced a single February 2024 obituary onto six such sites within 48 hours. WKYT (Kristen Kennedy), 7 July 2025.

3. The obituary is bait for something else entirely

The page ranks for the person's name, but reaching it produces redirects, a prompt to allow browser notifications, or an alarming virus warning dressed up as McAfee or Windows Defender.

Who pays for it: Affiliate commission on antivirus subscriptions, adware and unwanted software installs.

Secureworks' Counter Threat Unit documented this pattern and noted that on the sites it analysed it “did not observe evidence that the analyzed sites deployed malware” — the harm was the deception and the charges, not a virus. Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (now Sophos), 2024.

4. Synthetic-voice tribute videos, published before the family has finished arranging the funeral

A video appears reading a scraped notice in a synthetic voice over stock footage of a cemetery. Some channels upload dozens an hour.

Who pays for it: Video advertising revenue and affiliate links in the description.

Reporting on so-called obituary pirates found videos about 19-year-old Matteo Sachman were wrong about his age, his hometown and his cause of death. The Bereavement Authority of Ontario has warned that some such sites solicit donations in the name of the person who died and keep the money. Yahoo News, 2024.

5. A funeral “livestream” that asks for a card

A comment appears beneath a genuine funeral notice saying the service is being streamed, with a link. The page asks for card details, often phrased as verifying your location, and the fine print is a subscription.

Who pays for it: Recurring card charges, and the card details themselves.

Malwarebytes documented one such page in August 2024. It asked for a card because “we need to verify your geographic location using a valid credit card”, advertised the membership at “only 2.00€”, and carried a pre-ticked line of small print reading “2X recurring payments every 14 days, current rate (64 €)”. The same report notes the BBC's March 2024 warning that these criminals sometimes respond to a posted memorial message within minutes, using a fake profile carrying the photograph and personal details of the person who died. Malwarebytes, August 2024.

6. The obituary is the research for a later approach

Nothing appears online at all. Instead, a caller or an email arrives some weeks later that knows the spouse's name, the children's names, the town, the employer, the regiment, the parish.

Who pays for it: Whatever the approach is for — an unpaid debt, an unpaid tax bill, a fee to release something.

AARP describes criminals harvesting “the deceased's birth date, where the person lived and worked, and family members' names” to build a profile, then using it to open accounts, take out loans or file tax returns in the dead person's name — identity theft it calls “ghosting”. The FTC has separately warned of callers posing as funeral home staff who claim the service will be cancelled unless more money is paid immediately. A well-written obituary is, unavoidably, a well-organised dossier. That is not a reason to write a poor one; it is a reason to choose deliberately what goes in. AARP, checked 2026-08-28.

The warning signs

No single one of these proves anything. Two or three together generally settle it.

• The page appeared before, or within a few hours of, the funeral home's own notice.
• The domain name is generic and unfamiliar, and matches no funeral home in the town.
• A detail you know is wrong — a middle name, an age, a date, a cause of death.
• No funeral home is named, or the one named has no such notice on its own website.
• Something is for sale beside the notice: flowers, candles, a memorial tree, a video.
• You are asked to pay, or to enter card details, to watch a service.
• A virus warning, a redirect, or a prompt to allow notifications appears.
• Donations are invited but no charity, funeral home or family member is named.
• There is no company name, no postal address, and no way to reach a person.

How to check whether a memorial page is real

1. Start from the funeral home, not from a search engine.
   Find the funeral home's own website directly and look for the notice there. A real notice will almost always be on it.
2. Telephone the funeral home.
   One call settles it. Funeral directors are asked this often and are not put out by being asked again.
3. Check the details you already know.
   Middle name, age, town, the date of the service. Fabricated notices tend to be fluent and specific, and wrong in small ways.
4. Look for who is publishing the page.
   A real memorial page has a named company behind it, a postal address and a way to reach a human being.
5. Never pay to watch a funeral.
   The National Association of Funeral Directors has said plainly that you should not have to pay to view a funeral livestream, and that official links come from the funeral director.
6. Do not donate through a link you reached from a search result.
   If the family has asked for donations, they will have named the charity. Go to that charity directly.
7. If a virus warning or a notification prompt appears, close the tab.
   Nothing on a genuine memorial page needs either.

If you have found a fake one

1. Tell the funeral home.
   They often keep a list, and they can warn the next family.
2. Report the page or the video to the platform that is carrying it.
   Search results, video platforms and social networks all have a report route, and obituary spam is now explicitly against Google's published spam policies.
3. Publish the real notice promptly somewhere official.
   Speaking to WKYT, Dr Lisa Blue of Eastern Kentucky University advised families to be proactive and control the narrative by posting an obituary on an official news site, a platform, or a funeral home website as soon as possible. A real notice that ranks well leaves the fakes with less room.
4. Keep a record before it disappears.
   A screenshot with the date and the address of the page is worth having if you later need to report it more than once.

What to leave out of an obituary

None of this is a reason to write a thin or impersonal notice, and a family should not have to think about fraud at all in the week after a death. But a few of the details that conventionally go into an obituary are worth a deliberate decision rather than a habit.

1. The full date of birth.
   The year is enough for almost every notice. A full date of birth beside a full name, a mother's maiden name and a home town is most of what an account-opening form asks for. AARP's advice is simply to leave out details that could be used for identity theft.
2. The mother's maiden name.
   Still used as a security question in more places than it should be. Include it only if the family particularly wants it.
3. Home addresses, for the person who died and for survivors.
   The town is usually the right level of detail.
4. A full employment history.
   Where someone worked matters; a chronology of employers, dates and job titles reads like a curriculum vitae and is more useful to a stranger than to a mourner.
5. Anything that identifies a living child you would rather were not identified.
   Grandchildren are often listed by first name only, or by number. Either is perfectly normal in a notice.
6. Consider who will be at home during the service.
   The time and place of a funeral is public by design. That is not a reason to withhold it, but it is worth a moment's thought about the house.

Our own intake asks, among other things, whether the cause of death should be omitted, described generally, or stated in the family's own words, because that is a decision the family should make on purpose rather than by default.

Why we publish nothing

MemorialSuite has no public memorial pages. No hosted obituary, no guest book, no candles, no donation collection, no shareable tribute. You answer the questions, you check a private preview, and you download the obituary, the funeral program and the eulogy as your own files. What you do with them afterwards is entirely yours, and we are not part of it.

This began as a limit rather than a principle. Hosting public memorial pages carries obligations we did not want to take on lightly — a page published about someone who has not died, a page a family did not want, a dispute between relatives about what it says — and we decided the first version of this product would simply not have them. Having lived with that decision, it also turns out to remove the thing the whole practice above depends on. We have no reason to want anybody to search for the name of the person who died, because there is no page of ours for them to land on.

None of which is a criticism of memorial pages, or of the funeral homes and established services that host them properly. Many families want one, and want it to last. The difficulty is only that in a list of search results, an honest hosted memorial and an imitation of one look much the same, and the imitation is counting on that.

Sources

Every factual claim above is attributed to one of these. Checked 2026-08-28.

• New updates to address spam and low-quality results — Google, 5 March 2024.
• What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies — Google Search Central, 5 March 2024.
• Are scammers using AI to enhance fake obituary sites? — Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (now Sophos), 2024.
• WKYT Investigates: Fake obituaries — WKYT (Kristen Kennedy), 7 July 2025.
• 'Obituary pirates' are spreading misinformation about people's deaths on YouTube — Yahoo News, 2024.
• Grieving loved ones targeted in obituary scams — AARP, checked 2026-08-28.
• Imposters prey on families preparing for the funeral of a loved one — Federal Trade Commission, June 2023.
• Fake funeral 'live stream' scams target grieving users on Facebook — Malwarebytes, August 2024.

Common questions

How can I tell if a memorial page for someone is real?

Start from the funeral home rather than from a search engine. Find the funeral home's own website and look for the notice there, or telephone them and ask. A genuine memorial page names the company behind it, gives a postal address and a way to reach a person, and does not ask you for a card, for a donation through an unnamed cause, or for permission to send you browser notifications.

Why do fake obituaries exist at all?

Because a death creates a short, intense burst of people searching for one particular name, and that attention can be sold. The pages carry advertising, sell flowers and candles beside the notice, earn affiliate commission on antivirus subscriptions, or take card details for a funeral livestream that does not exist. The grief is the traffic.

Is it a scam if a site copies an obituary but does not ask for money?

It is at least spam. Google named obituary spam directly in March 2024 when it introduced a scaled content abuse policy, which covers many pages generated to manipulate search rankings rather than to help anyone, however they were produced. Whether any particular site is also a fraud depends on what it does once you are there.

Someone has published a fake obituary for a member of my family. What can I do?

Tell the funeral home, report the page or video to the platform carrying it, and take a dated screenshot before it changes. Then publish the real notice promptly somewhere official — a funeral home site or a newspaper — so that the accurate version is the one people find. That last step is the advice given to WKYT by Dr Lisa Blue of Eastern Kentucky University, and it is the only one of the four that improves matters rather than just recording them.

Does MemorialSuite publish a memorial page for the person who died?

No. MemorialSuite publishes nothing online. You answer the questions, you review a private preview, and you download the obituary, the funeral program and the eulogy as your own files. There is no public memorial page, no hosted obituary, no guest book and no donation collection, so there is no page of ours for anyone to find, share or imitate.

Is a hosted memorial page a bad thing?

Not at all, and many families want one. Funeral homes and established memorial services host them properly and have every reason to. The difficulty is that in a list of search results the honest version and the imitation look much alike, which is what the imitation depends on. Our not hosting anything is a deliberate limit on what we do rather than a comment on anyone who does.