Reflecting on the Baiting Experiment

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 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 Iraglass 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. 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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 Indic ator. And it serves as a follow-up to an episode we released in April called Phobituaries. 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. Uh just one more reminder, we have a live show in Brooklyn this September, that you should definitely come to, and you can get tickets at tickets.hyperfixpod.com. So, yes, enjoy this conversation with Craig Silverman, and we will see you soon. Yo, hyperfixed gang. I'm realizing that I don't have like a name like a convenient name for the people who subscribe to the show. Um hyperfixationists, uh, fixers, fixes . I don't know. Is I really am having a hard time and I feel like I'm just doing a really bad Mark Marin impression, so I'm gonna go ahead and uh 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. Um, if you listened 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 gonna 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 . Hi, Craig. Hi, Craig. Hello. How's it going? Going all right. How are you? Alex was just whining about something tech related. 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. Um I I don't really know you, but that feels very on brand for what I know of you. Uh so 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. But then he said uh 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. Uh 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. But before we got into all that, I had to know how Craig found himself in this incredi bly specific niche, one where he had the skills to track down a fake obituary writer all the way in Nigeria. It used to be an extremely small niche with like people I could count on two hand s 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 you know 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 called sort of open source intelligence investigations uh figuring out what stuff that is spreading online and I'm just obsessed with how our media environment is being manipulated. What do you mean by digital deception? 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. Um 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 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 gonna do for the rest of my career. That's a really good question. Um 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 analyzed 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. And 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 actually 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 a real problem here. We have a large scale operation um 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.' Wow. 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 seven million dollars from advertisers, publishers and other platforms, was sentenced to ten years in prison in on November 10th, 202 1. 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. It seems like uh 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 i i am i right in assuming that? Absolutely. In this field, they talk about a highly advers arial 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 at 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. 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. Um 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 ads showing up on like a fake Obit website. Like how does that what what is that process? 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 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, uh 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 advertis ing platform and the biggest one is Googles uh 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 twenty-five and forty-five 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 time the day you want your ads to run. And then you basically say like, okay, Google, place my ads. Um and so at that point Google takes over and it is going and looking for people who are visiting websites, loading up mobile 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 gonna 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 or inch. 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 by packages, if I fit their criteria, they can send a bid and they can say I'll pay three dollars and somebody else might pay ten. And the person who pays ten, they win the auction and their ad loads in the app on the website. 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? So you can a hundred percent 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 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 So the issue is that there's no vetting of the ad spaces in the Internet inventory, basically ? Well, in theory there is. Uh 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 gonna 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 kind of in to like you 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. 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 uh call center ad services kind of stuff, and then in the back, they'll be doing virus sc ams. And they do that. So if the cops show up, they're just like, yeah, look at what look at what we're doing. We're working with, you know, uh whomever. And it's crazy that that's how that works. Yeah. Google is gonna scan sites initially as they're being applied to 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 just 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. I think beautiful is a relative term in this circumstance. Okay, fair. It's a vibrant, flowing, fragrant garden of ad fraud. How about that? So there are so many different types of bad fraud. There are so many different ways to steal money out of this ecosystem because it operates with a level of 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 sip out a few million here and there, and and honestly, it's crazy, but people don't notice. So, very simple example would be: um, you start a website, you put content on the website, you get accepted into Google's ad 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 gonna get money at the end of the month if Google doesn't detect that these this is a fraudulent audience. Another one that has been popular over time is spoofing. So um 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. Um, but your ads you thought you were buying on the New York Times or Wall Street Journal and 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 a hundred percent 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 audiences 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. We'll be right back after the break. I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change. Today we have more incentives for market solutions than ever, and emissions are rising. On this season of drilled Carbon Cowboys, the story of three market solutions colliding in one multinational boondoggle. Gotta give Bruce of the guys credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a shit about any of this now. Listen anywhere you get podcasts. 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, and 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. 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Taskers book up fast, especially for same-day tasks. So book trusted home help today. That's $15 off your first task using promo code Hyperfixed with the TaskRabbit app or TaskRabbit.com . You told us that you went down a rabbit hole with this and found someone who was actually making these fake OBIT websites. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about this person. Yeah. So basically you guys shared with me a few links to articles or Facebook groups or pages that have 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 were 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, you know, download this ad blocker, or takes you to a page that tells you your device is infected and you need to do something. I had in some cases I clicked on them and they took me to 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 run 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 gonna 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'.re g Theettingy re ported. 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 gonna get money out of that. So that was like the first thing that I saw. And so from there, do you do you maybe I should I share my screen? I know you're not gonna use this for video, but yeah, okay. Yeah, definitely. So one of the sites that you guys sent me um was Memoir News with the Zed 360 dot site. And so when I went to that, it was dead. This is what I saw is like account has been suspended. And this was the case for a lot of like the stuff that you guys sent me. Um, 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 memoirnews360.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. I can 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. Oh that's so smart. 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 gotta keep going. So And to be clear to our audience who are not buying websites, memoir news360.site is probably nine bucks, right? 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 chat GPT for free and be like, generate fifty 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 and because they know it like the account's going to get k illed 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 doma in names hosted on the same IP address. So there 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 name cheap. That's also where they bought the domain n ame. And so this is like 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 an 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, memoirnews.site. Oh my God, this is crazy, Craig The 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 than more recently that a domain name is registered. And so we had memorial facst.ite 28 days ago and it happened.site about two months ago. And so I went to it happened.site and it happened.site is actually live. Um and so yeah, so we have a live ob it site here. There's, you know, and I'm like, okay, this looks like the template of somebody who's just throwing together these things and trying to, you know, get as much traffic to them from Facebook as possible. And so at this point, one of the things I did was try to see like what account is sort of 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 a WordPress site, because I could see actually I have this little tool called Wappalizer, and I could see that this is a WordPress hosted site. Apparently installed in it, which might help us connect other sites together. And I could just get a little snapshot of the tech here. And so just to clarify for me, what is Wappalizer doing? So Wappalizer is a free browser extension that basically scans the web page you're on and tells you all of the tools and infrastructure that are making that website work. Gotcha. Okay, that's so cool. And so like when I'm trying to investigate a website, I want to know, 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 of articles here. But one of the things that's cool is like, oh, they have a they actually have a little author icon. They have a little gravitar, which is something that sort of you can upload a photo of yourself. So this is the author photo and it says tgtrends.com.ng. It has a URL in their author photo. Oh my god. Merry Christmas, right? So it's like great, okay. And and one of the things to know uh about these author images, these gravitar 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, like obviously, we could do a search on tgtrends.com.ng and you know tgtrends.com.ng. ng is the top-level domain extension for Nigeria. Um, and in this case, uh, one of the things is it 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 like let's see. I actually I found here we go. So we've got a name. Oh my god.. God Ormasan Temedayo. He's in Nigeria. We got a phone number. We got an email. Temodor mason at gmail.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 that site. So we've got music tribe.com.ng um 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 uh 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 Oh my god, he has a LinkedIn. Yeah, I mean he's open to work. So if you guys need any web dev help. Wow. So you know he's a creative and detailed oriented web designer and developer with a strong background in building responsive, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But here's what's great. On his LinkedIn, he has also posted obituary content. Oh my God