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- [00:02]
Alex Goldman
Hey listeners. Right now there are some amazing news stories coming out of Ear Hustle, our fellow Radiotopia show, and the podcast about the daily realities of prison life. There's one episode called My Favorite Color where we hear the conversation between a father and daughter who haven't seen each other in 26 years, partly because the daughter followed in her dad's footsteps and paid a heavy price for it. In another, we meet a guy who at the age of 13, got a tattoo job on his face and that would influence the course of his life. And you know what? He's got no regrets. There's a story about what it's like to be betrayed by a dog, and another that explains how to hug someone when hugging itself is against the rules. These are the kinds of stories you hear on Ear Hustle. They're raw, they're deep, often very funny, and what Ira Glass calls decidedly untragic. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Also, check out their live show, which is swinging through the Northeast US at the end of May. Details are at earhustlesq.com/tour.
- [01:06]
This episode of Hyperfixed is brought to you by Drip Drop. So have you guys heard about this hot new product Drip Drop where you drop it into your drink and then you drip it into your damn mouth? Well, I'm about to tell you about it because it is doctor Developed proven fast hydration that helps your body and mind work better, which is exactly what 2026 U needs. Drift Drop uses science based formulas for rapid hydration so you feel results fast while getting three times the electrolytes of leading sports drinks. All you do is tear open the package, drop it into your drink and drip it right into that dang mouth. Drip Drop is trusted by firefighters, medical professionals and over 90% of top college and pro sports teams because it's engineered to hydrate you faster and more effectively than water alone. And all it takes is a drop in some water and a drip into that old gullet of yours. Drop Drip also just dripped. I mean Drip Drop also just dropped zero sugar plus a breakthrough formula with an advanced blend of six key electrolytes, 15 essential vitamins and nutrients, and no sugar or artificial sweeteners. There are 16 original flavors and eight zero sugar plus options that fit seamlessly into any routine. I myself have had the citrus flavored ones, they bang hard. You just drop them right in your drink. You drip it into your mouth. Just drip it right in there. Just dribble it into the dang mouth.
- [02:20]
Craig Silverman
You just drop it in the mouth.
- [02:21]
Alex Goldman
That's all you gotta do, you just drip it in there. Right now, Drip Drop is offering podcast listeners 20% off your first order. Go to drip drop.com and use promo code HYPERFIXED. That's drip drop.com promo code HYPERFIX for 20% off. Stock up now at drip drop.com and use promo code hyperfixed. Drip Drop. Drop it in your drink. Drip it into the mouth. This episode of Hyperfixed is brought to you by Momentous Fiber Plus. So I think it's no secret that part of my general dyspeptic demeanor is not just because I am incredibly depressed, but also because, well, to be honest, I have tummy troubles. You will never hear another person say my stomach feels weird more than I do. And you know what actually helps with this? Something that you barely think about at all ever. Fiber. I mean, fiber isn't new. It's not trendy. It's not like 6, 7 or hawk2o, but it might be one of the most important and most overlooked parts of your health. Nearly 95% of people aren't getting enough fiber. Modern diets and busy lifestyles make it really hard to get enough consistently. That's why Momentous launched Fiber Plus, a triple action formula combining soluble and insoluble fiber with prebiotic resistant starch to support gut health and digestion. It helps your body absorb nutrients, better stabilize blood sugar and improve recovery. Most fiber products haven't evolved. They're like old memes like like Rickroli. They're not like six, seven or Hoktua. They're single source and full of gut disrupting additives. Rickrolling is also single source and full of gut disrupting additives. Momentous took a different approach with Fiber plus, combining three types of fiber helping close a major gap in modern nutrition. Think about it this way. If your gut is functioning better, your everything else you're doing, your diet, your workouts, your recovery, your memes become more effective. Momentous sent me some Fiber plus and I gave it a shot. And you'd be shocked to hear how infrequently I was talking about how bad my tummy hurt. So seems like it works. Support your gut health and overall performance with Momentous Fiber plus and get up to 35% off your entire first order at livemomentous.com promo code HYPER FIXED that's livemomentous.com Promo code HYPERFIXED for up to 35% off or livemomentous.com promo Code HYPER FIXED. Hey, this is Alex and this week we are unlocking a bonus episode to give us a little breathing room on some stories that we're working on. But honestly, I am very excited to release this episode to a wider audience. It's an absolutely spectacular interview with journalist Craig Silverman of the Newsletter Indicator, and it's serves as a follow up to an episode we released in April called Fobituaries. So you should probably listen to that one first. But this is so good. I learned so much in the brief conversation that we had that you will hear now. So, yeah, that's it. Please enjoy. Just one more reminder. We have a live show in Brooklyn this September that you should definitely come to and you can get tickets@tickets.hyperfixpod.com so, yes, enjoy this conversation with Craig Silverman and we will see you soon. Yo, Hyper fixed, gang. I'm realizing that I don't have like a Nate, like a convenient name for the people who subscribe to the show. Hyper fixationists, fixers, fixes. I don't know as I really am having a hard time and I feel like I'm just doing a really bad Marc Maron impression. So I'm gonna go ahead and move on from this. But if you are listening to this, I appreciate the fact that you are a paid member. So thank you. You are the engine that makes this show happen. If you listen to last week's show about fake obituaries that pop up shortly after someone passes away, you know that there is a whole cottage industry around writing them. And if you didn't listen to that one, this episode's not going to make any sense for you. So you should go do that. But during the research on that story, Hyperfix producer Emma Cortland and I spoke to reporter Craig Silverman, who was actually able to track down one of the scammers who runs some of these websites behind these fake obituaries. And Craig gave us the rundown on how he found this scammer, thanks to a level of Internet sleuthing that even I, a person who reported on the Internet for 15 years, was totally incapable of. And so, as promised in the main feed episode, we are going to share that interview with you today. So we hope you enjoy it. And thanks again for supporting the show.
- [07:21]
Emma Cortland
Hi, Craig.
- [07:22]
Alex Goldman
Hi, Craig. Hello.
- [07:24]
Craig Silverman
How's it going? Going all right.
- [07:26]
Alex Goldman
How are you?
- [07:26]
Emma Cortland
Alex was just whining about something tech related.
- [07:29]
Alex Goldman
I was complaining about how every time a company makes like an update or an upgrade to an app just makes it harder to use.
- [07:38]
Craig Silverman
Well, I don't really know you, but that feels very on brand for what I know of you. So.
- [07:46]
Alex Goldman
Wow, man. Craig is a reporter and the co founder of Indicator, which is a publication that focuses on investigating digital deception. And that means both big investigative pieces about scams and things like that and how tos so people can learn how to investigate this stuff themselves. And when we first talked to him, we thought our interview with him was just going to be about how digital advertising works.
- [08:11]
Craig Silverman
But then he said, and by the way, I don't want to spoil anything, but like, I found a guy who's doing this. He's in Nigeria. So I don't mean to, like, ruin a punchline or whatever, but, like, based on what you sent me, I went down a rabbit hole and I came up with a young gentleman in Nigeria. So happy to walk you through that case study. Yeah.
- [08:31]
Alex Goldman
But before we got into all that, I had to know how Craig found himself in this incredibly specific niche, one where he had the skills to track down a fake obituary writer all the way in Nigeria.
- [08:46]
Craig Silverman
It used to be an extremely small niche with, like, people I could count on two hands who cared about it roughly a little more than a decade ago. And now it's a bit of a bigger niche. But the short answer is I started a blog in 2004 that looked at media errors, corrections, accuracy, and really kind of looked at how do we verify information as reporters and journalists. And in 2004, it was the early stages of blogging. But of course, time marches on and suddenly there's social media. And suddenly the challenge of verifying information is not just reporters in a newsroom's problem, it's everybody's problem, because it's all over Facebook, it's all over Twitter, it's everywhere. And so I just became a specialist in what people now call sort of open source intelligence investigations of figuring out what stuff that is spreading online. And I'm just obsessed with how our media environment is being manipulated.
- [09:38]
Alex Goldman
What do you mean by digital deception?
- [09:41]
Craig Silverman
It's definitely an umbrella term that is meant to encompass a whole wide range of things. So somebody, you know, is spreading a false claim on the Internet. Right. Which happens occasionally. And so like, that's one type of digital deception is content meant to deceive people. And that could be text, but increasingly it's people using generative AI to generate a video of, you know, a missile strike in Israel or in Iran or things like that. But it's also stuff like people paying for views and followers and engagement to give a representation of, you know, clout and popularity that they don't actually have. And there's so many different ways that people can now manipulate the digital environment. I mean, it could also be, you know, attacks and things on people's phones. Like there's something called SMS blasting or an MC catcher where it pretends to be a cell phone tower, your phone connects to it, and once your phone connects, they can spam tons of scam messages at you directly. And so, yeah, it's a very wide universe and we try to take a wide view so that it's not just, oh, somebody said something incorrect on the Internet.
- [10:47]
Emma Cortland
Was there a specific moment that radicalized you? If there was like a moment, if there was something that you experienced online where you were like, this is, this is my space. This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my career?
- [11:02]
Craig Silverman
That's a really good question. I don't know if there is an origin story moment or not. I remember many, many years ago, there was a data scientist who found people selling fake Twitter followers, bought a bunch, had them send the followers to his account and then analyze them to see where those same fake followers were also following to figure out other people who may have bought fake followers. And I remember seeing that, and that was like, that was pretty early on in like the 2010s. I remember seeing that and thinking, I want to do stuff like that. At the end of 2016 in the New York Times reported on an ad fraud scheme stealing millions of dollars where people pretended to be legitimate outlets in the digital advertising ecosystem and sort of siphoned off the money. And I had never heard of that before and that started me on a path to researching ad fraud. But that story was in some ways kind of a culmination of a behind the scenes effort with Google pulling in other major companies in the digital ad ecosystem, saying, we have a real problem here. We have a large scale operation that's stealing money and we have to stop it. And so Google and others in the industry came together and then they actually brought in people from the Department of Justice and sort of pitched this and saying, you guys should do something about this.
- [12:23]
Emma Cortland
Wow.
- [12:24]
Craig Silverman
Yeah. And so at the end of the day, the guy, Alexander Zhukov, who referred to himself in private messages as the king of fraud and who stole at least more than $7 million from advertisers, publishers and other platforms, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on November 10, 2021. And that is the largest and really most consequential federal prosecution that's ever happened for digital ad fraud in the United States. And since then, it is the Only federal prosecution or prosecution of any note for ad fraud in the United States or arguably anywhere in the world. And the guy was one of the guys literally typed in like a group chat. He referred to himself as the king of ad fraud, which didn't help at trial for him.
- [13:10]
Alex Goldman
It seems like it has always been the case that the Internet is basically in an arms race with people who are trying to deceive or scam you. And like every time one problem gets untangled by people who can stop the scam or, or block the scam, a new one arises. Is, am I right in assuming that?
- [13:30]
Craig Silverman
Absolutely. In this field they talk about a highly adversarial environment. Right. But it just means that the people trying to deceive, they are extremely motivated and innovative. They come up with stuff that sometimes you have to kind of shake your head and be like, man, that is really clever and devious because, you know, there's a lot of money to be made is often the motivation behind it. Or they're very committed to a cause and they're trying to figure out a way to sort of help their side win.
- [13:57]
Alex Goldman
The reason that we're talking to you today is because a listener wrote in and told us about a friend of his who died tragically. And within a day or two, several fake obit websites with either grossly incorrect or obviously AI generated information popped up. And we've come to learn through other interviews that these are mostly designed so that people can place ads against them and make money. But the thing that I want to understand is why ads end up on these scammy sites in the first place. And I'm wondering if you could just sort of walk us through the steps of an ad buy from the advertiser saying, I want to spend money on ads online to the ad showing up on like a fake obit website. Like, how does that, what is that process?
- [14:45]
Craig Silverman
I would love to tell you about the horribly murky, deceptive, awful, disgusting pig pile that is digital advertising. So there's about a trillion dollars a year spent on digital ads. Most of that money goes to like Meta and Google, although Amazon is becoming a very big player as well. And the key thing about most of those ads, and most of that money is it is placed through a real time auction site system. Okay, so if I'm an advertiser, I could be a big company, a small company. I want to reach the people who are, you know, a certain type of person that I know is my target market. And so what you can do is you basically get signed up to an advertising platform and the biggest one is Google. But you can also, you could go on to meta and say, like, okay, so I'm an advertiser now. I have a campaign and I'm trying to reach, you know, men in these states between 25 and 45 who might be interested in buying a car, who may be this. You can sort of basically set out a whole bunch of behavioral and demographic details of your target audience. And you kind of lock that in in your platform. You say how much you're sort of willing to spend. You say, you can also say like the times of day you want your ads to run. And then you basically say, like, okay, Google, place my ads. And so at that point, Google takes over and it is going and looking for people who are visiting websites, loading up mobile app apps who meet your criteria. And so like, that's the advertiser side is set your parameters. Here's what I want, here's how much I'm going to spend. Let's run this campaign and see the other side is you and me visiting, opening up an app that has ads, visiting a website that has ads. And the second, the milliseconds that we do that, the behavioral data about us, like our IP address, the other sites we've been visiting gets packaged up into what's called a bid request and sent off to an auction. And so what happens is like the auction is, hey, I got this guy. He seems to be a man. He seems to be in this location, he seems to be in this age range, he seems to be going to these types of websites who wants to show him an ad. And so then everybody who's placed these sort of ad buy packages, if I fit their criteria, they can send a bid and they can say, I'll pay $3 and somebody else might pay 10. And the person who pays 10, they win the auction and, and their ad loads in the app on the website.
- [17:11]
Alex Goldman
I would be the first to admit that the fact that we can have these micro auctions in milliseconds is like very amazing and a testament to the technology we have created for the Internet. It also seems incredibly convoluted. Like, why is the ad buying process so convoluted? Why is this the process we've landed on?
- [17:31]
Craig Silverman
So you can 100% say, I would like to run ads on these four sites. You could call up one site and do an ad deal. There are private marketplaces where you can go in and only buy from a certain pool of places. But the reason that most of the Ads, and most of the money goes to this auction, which is called programmatic advertising is because it's supposed to be so efficient. It's supposed to get you in front of people that you didn't know. You know, you think your target customer is reading the New York Times, you could go make a deal with the New York Times, but maybe that target customer is also ending up on tons of other sites and that charge a hell of a lot less than the New York Times for its ads. And so they are bargain hunting, they are efficiency hunting. And they also see it as, you know, a more overall efficient way to find an audience and through a much bigger pool than choosing just four websites.
- [18:22]
Alex Goldman
So the issue is that there's no vetting of the ad spaces in the Internet inventory, basically.
- [18:30]
Craig Silverman
Well, in theory there is, but we live in a world of unbelievable, unprecedented scale of digital platforms where they are so big that it is impossible, unless they hire tons and tons and tons of humans to actually review everything. Like the idea that Instagram is going to review every post manually to see if it violates its policies. Right. Kind of a non starter. And so we've all come to accept that. Oh man. Because there's so much content. Yeah, of course stuff is going to slip through. And it's the same in digital advertising. I mean, if you want to sign up with your website to join Google's advertising program and have Google place ads that go through its auction process on your website, you go and you apply and your application is reviewed and you have to meet certain criteria. And that application process has a lot of automated stuff and may also include some human review. But what often happens is I get accepted with one site into Google's ad network and then I've got 10 others that I'm running and I can put my same advertiser publisher code on all of those and the ads will run on those as well. So it's actually really easy once you're in, to reuse your special publisher ad code on many, many websites. And Google is not proactively scanning every one of these millions and millions and millions of websites that are in its program.
- [19:56]
Alex Goldman
I've done a lot of reporting on like call centers. And one of the things that I was told by people who worked at call centers is a lot of times they will do exactly this. They'll have like a front of house that's doing legitimate call center ad services kind of stuff and then in the back they'll be doing virus scams and they do that. So if the cops show up. They're just like, yeah, look. Look at what we're doing. We're working with, you know, whomever. It's crazy that that's how that works.
- [20:24]
Craig Silverman
Yeah, Google is going to scan sites initially as they're being applied to enter, but they don't rescan every single site and every single page of every site every single day. And so it's very easy to sort of hide in plain sight just through the scale of the program. I mean, I did an investigation a few years ago where we found, like a sanctioned entity was getting Google Ads because they started a new website and got a new ad code for that new website. And Google wasn't tracking that. It's the same sanctioned entity. There's so many ways to just hide and conceal because of the scale of the operation. I mean, there's a whole beautiful world of digital ad fraud.
- [21:04]
Alex Goldman
I think beautiful is a relative term in this circumstance.
- [21:07]
Craig Silverman
Okay, fair. It's a vibrant, flowing, fragrant garden of ad fraud. How about that? So there are so many different types of ad fraud. There are so many different ways to steal money out of this ecosystem because it operates with a level of opacity and lack of transparency. And if you have the technical knowledge of how it works, you can just come along and just sort of thip out a few million here and there. And honestly, it's crazy, but people don't notice. So very simple example would be you start a website, you put content on the website, you get accepted into Google's app program, and instead of putting in the time and effort to build a real audience for your website, you program bots fake visitors to come to your website and to load pages with ads on them, and boom, you're going to get money at the end of the month. If Google doesn't detect that this is a fraudulent audience, another one that has been popular over time is spoofing. So if you know how to get into a digital ad auction environment, so to get approved as a seller of ads, as a publisher, for a long time, people were able to pretend to be the Wall Street Journal or the Guardian or the New York Times. And so I think my brand ads are appearing on the Wall Street Journal. They're actually appearing on some dummy headless website run by a dude, often in Russia. And so the money ends up to the dude in Russia. But your ads you thought you were buying on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and they weren't. And literally the only time anybody's ever gone to jail for ad fraud in the United States was an example like that. And the guy was one of the guys literally typed in like a group chat. He referred to himself as the king of ad fraud, which didn't help at trial for him. If I was a crook, I would 100% do ad fraud. Huge, huge upside of money to steal, almost zero risk of going to jail. Now one of the dynamics which I think is very relevant to the obituary sites is that because somebody in somewhere around the world that has a very low cost of living where their economic opportunities are relatively small, suddenly them being able to launch websites in English, to get into the world's largest ad network with Google, and to potentially earn money from English language audiences that are more valuable, suddenly they have a transformative economic opportunity. And so we basically unlocked another level of manipulation which is people overseas targeting wealthy English language AUD and countries with whatever content gets engagement because they can earn a better living doing that than a lot of the other stuff that's available to them.
- [23:53]
Alex Goldman
We'll be right back after the break.
- [24:03]
Craig Silverman
Every Sunday we cover the week's tech news on this Week in Tech. Hi, this is Leo Laporte inviting you to join me this week as Berber Ginn from the Wall Street Journal and
- [24:12]
Alex Goldman
Paris Martineau from Consumer Reports.
- [24:13]
Craig Silverman
Join Ian Thompson and we'll talk about, of course, OpenAI and Anthropic. They got together with a bunch of religious leaders and decided what religion AI is. They've also figured out how to keep it from blackmailing you. You just say, well, that would be wrong. This week at Tech, you'll find it at Twit TV and wherever you get your podcasts.
- [24:35]
Alex Goldman
This episode of Hyperfixed is brought to you by Mixtape. Mixtape is a narrative adventure game by BAFTA award winning Studio Beethoven and Dinosaur and it features music from Devo, Roxy Music, Lush, the Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Suzy and the Banshees, Joy Division, the Cure, and many more. And at least two of my favorite bands of all time appeared in that list. Can you guess which ones? The game is a surreal teenage wasteland where you skate, party, avoid the law, space out, fly, embrace the optimal teenage experience. Mixtape is available May 7th on console and PC. Check it out at Mixtape Game. This episode of Hyperfixed is brought to you by Strawberry Me. Let me ask you something. Are you where you want to be in your career or are you waking up every day knowing that you're capable of more but you're not sure how to get there? Like, are you maybe an independent podcaster who hasn't paid himself in six months and is trying to make a documentary audio podcast in an environment that's hostile to anything that doesn't have Jason Bateman hosting it. Well, success doesn't just happen, and the most successful people in the world don't figure it out alone. They have mentors, coaches and people guiding them every step of the way. And that's where Strawberry Me comes in. Career coaching gives you the clarity, strategy and accountability needed to turn your goals into reality, whether it's landing a new job, advancing your current role, or transitioning into a field you love. With expert guidance, you'll identify obstacles holding you back. Develop a step by step plan knowing that you have a dedicated coach supporting you every step of the way. I know that I personally have needed a lot of mentorship to start my own moderately unsuccessful business. It's been invaluable in terms of navigating things like incorporating an llc, how to hire people, how to prepare for tax time, and how to make sure everyone besides me stays paid and their morale stays high. So don't host a podcast where you haven't been able to pay yourself in months. That sounds ridiculous. Get professional coaching from Strawberry Me and take control of your career trajectory. Go to Strawberry Me HyperFixed and get 50% off your first coaching session. That's Strawberry Me Hyperfixed. It's like therapy for your career. This episode of Hyperfixed is brought to you by Quints. So listen. Summertime is suddenly upon us and it is hot as heck out there and I want light, breathable clothes to wear, but I also don't want to look like a hairy naked goblin. I simply gotta look fly. I have to have the freshest fits. I need that drip. And that's why I keep going back to Quint's. Quince focuses on high quality essentials that feel and look amazing. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, well made basics without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated but still effortless. And that is ad copy speak for the fits of fresh, fresh fits for fun friends. As I always say, Quint's European linen pants and shirts are the perfect warm weather upgrade to add to your rotation. Starting at just $34. Their tees are soft and easy to wear and their lightweight cotton sweaters are perfect for cooler summer nights. I got one of their relaxed fit short sleeve shirts and I look like a handsome dad from a clothes catalog in it. And be honest, there's no better look than handsome catalog dad. It's the freshest fit for a fun friend. As I always say, elevate Your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com hyperfixed for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com hyperfixed for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com hyperfixed fresh fits for fun friends. The Quince Promise. You told us that you went down a rabbit hole with this and found someone who is actually making these fake obit websites. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about this person.
- [28:54]
Craig Silverman
Yeah, so basically you guys shared with me a few links to articles or Facebook groups or pages that had been sharing this stuff. And so I started with those. And you know, the first thing that I would say is when I visited some of these sites that still active with my ad blocker turned off, this was a very, very aggressive, malicious type of advertising campaign. This is not like banner ads running from Google. This is the second you load the page or you click anywhere on the page, it click jacks you meaning like taking that click and sending you somewhere you didn't intend to go. And suddenly taken to a page that tells you to download this ad blocker or takes you to a page that tells you your device is infected and you need to do something. In some cases, I clicked on them and they took gambling websites. And so this is to me is a signal. You know, this is a hit and run operation is what I would say on these obituary websites. They are stealing content, generating AI generated stuff and sort of violating a bunch of different policies that these websites don't stay up for very long. And so they'll launch one of these websites, load a bunch of obit stuff on it. And apparently, you know, it's, I'm guessing at some point maybe they were on Google, but they probably got booted off Google and other ad networks. And so now they have to go for like the lowest, most malicious type stuff, which is having no patience to build an audience. They're just the second you load the page, they're going to fire a bunch of things at you. And the model here is an affiliate model whereby if you sign up for the betting site that they send you to, if you download the Chrome extension and install that that they've pointed you to, these guys will earn a commission. And so this is the kind of advertising that they're doing. It is not the, oh, we'll show you a bunch of banner ads and Google will put some money in your bank account at the end of the Month display ads. This is like low end hit and run, malicious type of things. And I think it's because they know these websites can't stay on long. They're getting taken down, they're getting reported, and so they have to just like squeeze the juice out of any possible click they can get. And that means they can't wait that Google might withhold the ad revenue at the end of the month. They need to basically force you to somewhere where if you take an action, download something, install something, they're going to get money out of that. So that was like the first thing that I saw. And so from there, do you, do you maybe should I share my screen? I know you're not going to use this for video, but yeah, okay.
- [31:16]
Alex Goldman
Yeah, definitely.
- [31:18]
Craig Silverman
So one of the sites that you guys sent me was Memoir News with a Z360 site. And so when I went to that, it was dead. This is what I saw as like, account has been suspended. And this was the case for a lot of like the stuff that you guys sent me. Obviously the hosting company sees what this person is up to and kicks them off. Right. So one of the things that I typically do is like, okay, well I'm curious, has this site been shared around? And so I didn't actually get a lot of results for memoirenews360 site. And so then I have access to a tool called Domain Tools where I can put in the domain name and I can see if there's anything about its technical infrastructure, like where it's hosted or the person who bought this domain name. Just do a quick check to see if there's anything here that's helpful. And so one of the things I saw was registered two months ago, which totally makes sense. Whoever's doing this, they need to buy domains consistently and cycle through those. And oftentimes what they're doing is basically reloading all the same content they had on the previous site that's now been banned into the new one.
- [32:24]
Alex Goldman
Oh, that's so smart.
- [32:26]
Craig Silverman
And it's good news for people like me because it's like if they're reusing their content, I can maybe find them as they move along. So, you know, this is their cost. They have to buy new domain names all the time. They have to sign up or find free hosting that they can do. And then they obviously have to find the audience, which typically it seems like they're sharing a lot of these in Facebook groups or on Facebook to try and get people to click. But it's hit and run. They got to keep going. So, and to be clear to our
- [32:51]
Alex Goldman
audience who are not buying websites, Memoir News360 site is probably nine bucks, right?
- [32:57]
Craig Silverman
It's like, yeah, that's it. This is not one of those domain names where they have sort of dynamic pricing, where this guy is having to sit there probably in like using ChatGPT for free and be like, generate 50 domain names with some kind of memoir or obit in it. And then they buy these nine bucks a piece. They probably are finding free hosting plans or again, paying for a relatively cheap hosting plan or just like signing up if they can find fake credit card info because they know like the account's going to get killed within days or weeks. And so obviously they paid for privacy. So the guy's name isn't in this. But Domain Tools tells me when I scroll along a little bit further that there are 178 other domain names hosted on the same IP address. So these websites are associated with the same kind of physical server where all the content for the websites is being hosted. It's a server associated with namecheap. That's also where they bought the domain name. This is telling me, okay, because this is a hit and run bulk operation, there's a chance that some of these other domains hosted on this same server are actually owned by and affiliated with the same guy. And so I did a search in this case and I actually found like a whole bunch of other domains with names like Weekly Memoir site, Memoir News site.
- [34:14]
Emma Cortland
Oh my God, this is crazy. Craig.
- [34:17]
Craig Silverman
Weekly Memoir, Memoir. Oh, blitz. Anyway, it goes on and on and on. And so at this point, the hope is, can I find more sites here? And like, see, is it the same person? Do they look the same? But also, did this guy screw up and at some point buy a domain name and not pay for privacy? Or is he got like personal sites on the same IP that he didn't realize somebody would do this on? And so I ended up looking and one of the ones that I found, one of the things I did was I said, okay, the chances of me finding an active site is greater the more recently that a domain name is registered. And so we had memorialfact site 28 days ago and it happened site. About two months ago, I went to It Happened site and It Happened site is actually live. Oh, wow, we have a live obit site here. And I'm like, okay, this looks like the template of somebody who's just throwing together these things and trying to get as much traffic to them from Facebook as possible at this point. One of the things I did was try to see what account is placing all these. So we can see that the account is called It Happened. That's the sort of author name on it. And so what I like to do with the WordPress site, because I could see, actually I have this little tool called Wappalyzer and I could see that this is a WordPress hosted site. I could see that they've got Google Analytics apparently installed in it, which might help us connect other sites together. And I could just get a little snapshot of the tech here.
- [35:50]
Emma Cortland
And so just to clarify for me, what is Wappalyzer doing?
- [35:54]
Craig Silverman
Wappalyzer is a free browser extension that basically scans the webpage you're on and tells you all of the tools and infrastructure that are making that website work.
- [36:05]
Emma Cortland
Gotcha. Okay, that's so cool.
- [36:08]
Craig Silverman
When I'm trying to investigate a website, I want to know what its stack is, because if I know that it's hosted on WordPress, I have a list of different things that I can do unique to WordPress sites. I know if it's using Google Analytics, it might have a unique Google Analytics ID embedded in the source code, which I could then use to potentially find other sites with the same analytics id. And so that's helpful. And one of the things that I found here is so we have the author name. It's the author of all of the articles. There's 21 pages of articles here. But one of the things that's cool is like, oh, they actually have a little author icon. They have a little Gravatar, which is something that sort of you can upload a photo of yourself. So this is the author photo and it tgtrends.com ng it has a URL
- [36:56]
Alex Goldman
in their author photo.
- [36:57]
Craig Silverman
Oh my God. Merry Christmas. Right. So it's like, great, okay. And one of the things to know about these author images, these Gravatar accounts that are used to kind of create your author accounts on WordPress or to make comments on WordPress sites, is people often have persistent accounts across different websites. And so, you know, my theory that this guy is reusing content, re uploading it, and sort of like rinsing and repeating to launch new sites. And so right away, obviously we could do a search on tgtrends.com ng and tgtrends.com ng ng is the top level domain extension for Nigeria in this case. One of the things is it was registered over eight years ago, which is great because then I could look in the history of its registration of when it was first registered and I actually, I found. Here we go. So we've got a name.
- [37:54]
Alex Goldman
Oh my God.
- [37:55]
Craig Silverman
Ormosan Temadayo. He's in Nigeria. We got a phone number, we got an email. Temadore ormosanmail.com now that's a good lead right there. The other thing is like when I was in Domain Tools and all those sites hosted on the ip, when I scrolled through and I was looking to find, hey, is there a site in here where somebody didn't hide their info? Well, guess what? It's the same Gmail that we just saw registered to that site. So we've got musictribe.com ng we've got freebiesloaded.com ng it's the same Gmail, it's the same guy. And look at this. The organization is TG Trends, which is also TG Trends here. So like, pretty good connections on this. And one of the things we can do is we can take this email and just sort of find out what's going on with this guy a little bit here. And so here it is, this site which sort of had info about TG Trends. This is like a site analyzer thing. Absolutely listed him in connection with that. But also what's kind of funny is this dude has been posting a lot on forums for website managers and so he's talking to people about different ways of doing this. So he's clearly somebody who knows how to run and launch websites and he's answered when people posted about writers and bloggers needed. And so all that to say, I mean this guy does appear to be the person running that site. And I actually just want to pull up his LinkedIn here.
- [39:26]
Emma Cortland
Oh my God, he has a LinkedIn.
- [39:28]
Craig Silverman
Yeah, I mean he's open to work. So if you guys need any web dev help. Wow. So he's a creative and detailed oriented web designer and developer with a strong background in building responsive, et cetera, et cetera. But here's what's great. On his LinkedIn, he has also posted obituary content.
- [39:46]
Emma Cortland
Oh my God.
- [39:48]
Alex Goldman
Listen, if you're trying to promote, you always gotta be promoting. I totally respect the hustle.
- [39:53]
Craig Silverman
You gotta sell, baby. And these are different sites than ones I had seen. But channel 4 now blog and infomemorials site are actually, I believe, both in our list of others that are hosted on the same IP. But yeah, channel4now.com. So the connections here are pretty strong. And from there obviously you could visit every single one of these sites sites and see if they are using the exact same content. Using the exact same design. Some of them load, some of them don't. But at the end of the day, it does appear that this one segment. Here we go. So look, here's Channel 4 TV site. Exact same template, some of the exact same content. And Channel 4 TV is the author. And I actually hadn't looked at this before, and yep, there's the same gravatar, same icon on there. And so it looks like this is our guy running one of these networks. I can't say he's running every obituary site that you guys have come across, but he's definitely got a network of what appears to be dozens and dozens of sort of obituary sites, of stealing the content, generating the content, feeding it on Facebook. And then I'm looking at this site with my ad blocker on. I'm going to take my ad blocker off, reload the site, and it's going to make me accept some cookies here. Let's see what happens with this site. Oh, yeah, wait, let's go to an actual article. And so here we go. Boom. I have been redirected instantly to a betting website. If you look in the URL of this betting website, I'm going to use a little tool here I like called Unfurl, which can take a long URL and break it out. It will probably see something in the URL like aff equals or afid equals. And that would mean affiliate id, which means to promote Botano, you can register in Batano's affiliate program. And when, if somebody signs in and deposits money based on a link with your affiliate code in it, you can earn a commission from that. And so that was just.
- [42:00]
Alex Goldman
It's like an Amazon referral code like you put.
- [42:02]
Craig Silverman
It's like an Amazon referral code. Exactly. Here we go. We have AFADID6924. That could potentially be the affiliate ID of this guy or somebody connected to him. One of the ways to then further connect that is to visit a bunch of these sites, see if we get directed to Bitano by them. And look, if every single time it has the same affiliate id, that would be another chain of connection pulling all the websites together to the monetization model.
- [42:34]
Alex Goldman
My mind is absolutely blown right now.
- [42:37]
Craig Silverman
I'm pretty sure the phone number I have works on WhatsApp. There's an email. And by the way, there's another thing I could run on his email and his phone number if we want to find additional accounts and stuff like that. But I mean, there's a fair amount already. So, yes, I Did not. You guys, you're welcome to take it from here.
- [42:52]
Emma Cortland
This was a perfect layup. I'm so excited. And you know what? Alex Goldman, everybody knows this about him, loves calling scammers. It's like his favorite thing in the world.
- [43:00]
Alex Goldman
It is kind of a hobby of mine. If you follow us on social media, you are probably noticing at toward the end of March that we posted a couple of obituaries for people on our social media. On our, on our social media sites. We posted one for someone named Alice Goldblatt, which was meant to be a riff on my name, and one for Gemma Portland, which was obviously a riff on Emma's, and one for Amber Gates, which was a riff on Amore Yates. And the idea was if we posted obituaries that seemed real enough and our audience engaged with those posts in the comments, would scammers detect them and show up and start writing fake obituaries with all the fake details we came up with based off of our also fake obituaries. And we did try to forewarn people that these fake obituaries were for a story we were working on, but they genuinely confused a lot of you. And I'm sorry.
- [43:57]
Emma Cortland
One of the funny things that I wanted to ask you about just is that we haven't been able to figure out and we're gonna ask this guy if we get him on the phone. Is that. So we tried to run an experiment where we tried to bait some fake obituaries of our own to potentially get picked up. And none of them got picked up. And so I'm really interested. I'm curious if you have any theories. We ran one on Twitter, we ran one on Instagram, and we're. We ran one on Facebook and none of them got picked up.
- [44:24]
Alex Goldman
All that we accomplished was confusing our listeners.
- [44:27]
Emma Cortland
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we confuse them a lot.
- [44:29]
Craig Silverman
Did you run your own obituaries or what did you do?
- [44:31]
Alex Goldman
No, no, we used sort of made up names.
- [44:33]
Emma Cortland
Well, there was one for Elise Goldblatt and there was one for Gemma Portland and my name's Emma Cortland. So we did like, variations on our names. It was so confusing to our listeners, but it makes me think that it's not. And we recruited a bunch of people to comment things about their lives. So we like, we had the. So we used our, the power of our discord to recruit a group of people with. And we created little like backstories for each one of these people, right. So they comment and be like, like Gemma Portland was like really involved in the pta. She made great brownies, like da da da da. So like, we. And she like knitted hats for all of the kids on the block. So, like, these were the things that populated the comment section of her fake obituaries. But the thing that I kept wondering was because we had talked to someone who had connected with one of these, like Nigerian scammers, obit scammers, and said that he had found a bunch of these things through Facebook. The interesting thing to me now is that I suspect the thing that we didn't do, which was that nobody was doing Google searches for Gemma Portland obituary. Like, right. So that there was actually no one demanding these things. People were just engaging.
- [45:47]
Craig Silverman
One of the things is you definitely want to put yourself in their shoes. And it's like, okay, if I need to hunt obituaries to steal, what are the keywords I would use to make searches? Where would I be searching? Like, I would be going to local newspapers, I would be going to online obituary sites and stealing from there. And then when it comes to Facebook, I wonder if there are like more legitimate Facebook groups where people hang out and share real obituaries. Because, like, I would hang out one of those. So, yeah, I think that is putting yourself in their shoes of like, how they're looking and finding. You've probably spoken to scammers and people before. Like, my experience is like, sometimes they want you to hire them. Like, I've gotten on the phone with people who really produce like AI flop YouTube videos. And I've said a million times, I'm a journalist. And they're still like, so what kind of videos do you want me to make for you? And so he may not give you the secrets of the trade, but you know, a lot of times they're just in sales mode. And obviously there's really no, not a lot of concern that they have about getting caught in a lot of cases because it's like, well, what are you really going to do to me? But I also, like, I try to have, depending on what they're doing, the level of harm there is often a certain level of empathy is like, what are the other options that are available to him? The reality in a lot of countries, whether it's Nigeria, India, Pakistan or what have you, it's like, like, if you are actually a young tech savvy person, this is the fastest path to making some money than actually trying to land like a legitimate marketing job, because that's really hard. And so the economic opportunity from scamming AI flopping, figuring out ways of hoovering up a little bit of revenue here and there through different digital deception tactics is there's a global industry of that because it actually is one of the better opportunities for them. This is true in many countries around the world and it usually ends up with them targeting English language audiences because that's where the better revenue is.
- [47:53]
Alex Goldman
A massive thanks to Craig for all of his hard work on our behalf and if you want to check out his work you can do so over at Indicator Media. We will put a link in the show. Notes. Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Emma Courtlet, Tory Dominguez Peak Serious Offer Sukanik and Amor Yates. Our engineer is Tony Williams and the music this week is by me. Fun fact this week is that every summer, when it starts getting warm enough as it has just recently, I pull out the album Since I Left you by the Avalanches and I drive around with my windows down blasting it. And I guess the fun fact here is it is a album that is composed entirely of samples. There are about 200 samples per song, about 3,500 in total. There are samples that are such deep cuts that even after 26 years of this album being released, people are still trying to figure out where they came from. It's virtually perfect. It is so beautiful. It's such a summertime banger. I can't strongly recommend it enough. And isn't it cool that there's 3, 500 samples on the album? That's insane. Anyway, that's it. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next week.
- [49:35]
Craig Silverman
Radiotopia from prx.