My friend Augustine, who's an expert in ad fraud analytics, sent me to this investigation by Verge, which is highly illuminating about how digital advertising attracts all kinds of unlikely fraudsters. The story involves dead people, faked obituaries, and advertisers.
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Some people are discovering faked obituaries of their dead relatives online. These are AI-generated text, with partially correct information. Automatically generating such obituaries is possible nowadays as it combines two tech developments: the collection of data by apps and businesses, and the merging of such data with impunity. Starting with a list of newly dead people, a developer can obtain private information from any of the numerous companies that sell compiled profiles on everyone. Such information is only partially correct since data merging is inexact. In addition, large language models make up facts.
What is the point of producing fake obituaries?
Let's start with the digital advertising ecosystem. Let's say the local newspaper has a website (or mobile app) on which they publish obituaries. This digital newspaper is likely to use the only one business model that has been proven to work - advertising revenues. Advertisers may want to put ads around the content of their site, hoping to influence the site's readers. So, the first thing the newspaper management has to do is to generate traffic to the website. If the site had no readers, there will be no ads served to anyone.
This is where Google comes in. Google has a quasi-monopoly of search traffic so it can deliver traffic to the local newspaper. For example, someone may google for an obituary and land on the newspaper site. The newspaper managers can boost traffic to their site by paying Google to buy "keywords". Let's say they buy the keyword "obituary". Typically, the newspaper site pays Google by clicks (i.e. the action of clicking on a results link on the Google results page and landing on the newspaper site). Google thus has an incentive to send more traffic to the newspaper.
Next, the newspaper managers need to find advertisers. Instead of selling directly, they can also talk to (another division of) Google. Google will then develop relationships with advertisers, and then based on the amount of ads served to the newspaper website, share a proportion of the advertising revenue with the newspaper. Notice that Google double dips here, and it has every incentive to push lots of traffic to the newspaper which allows lots of ads to be shown.
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The ecosystem has been seized upon by scammers. All scammers have to do is to put up some websites, then use google to push traffic to these sites, then put up some mildly relevant content (tuned to the search keywords), then surround the content with ad slots, then use google to push ads into those slots, then get the revenue share from google.
In the case of these fake obituaries, the websites that carry them make bank whenever google drives traffic to those pages. (Google also makes bank in the process.)
A key part of this ecosystem is automation, which removes the human from the process. Removing human participation also removes human scrutiny. Most advertisers won't be able to tell you where their ads were shown. The Google network delivers ads to so many properties, large and small, it takes a lot of effort to get and answer to that question.
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