Facebook Funeral Scam Targets Grieving Families: 'Disgusting'

A new scam on Facebook is targeting grieving families out of hundreds if not thousands of dollars during one of their most emotionally vulnerable times.

The funeral scam operates after users experience the death of a loved one, and fraudsters send out what appears to be a livestream link to friends and family of the deceased. Once on the link, though, Facebook users are asked for their credit cards and cheated out of significant amounts of money.

Victims of the fraud say the funeral livestream announcements are so compelling because they strip details about the deceased from real funeral services' pages and put them into a fake post.

One would-be victim, who was targeted in just one example of the scam going around about their cousin, told tech news site 404 Media the scams create "panic on the day where you shouldn't be thinking of that," and ultimately called the financial ploys "disgusting."

The victim interviewed by 404 Media was sent to a tinyurl link from another Facebook account that said, "Please Like, Share Your Family and Friends," next to a photograph of their dead relative.

It then took the manipulation tactics even further, saying, "You will get the link once the registration is complete. I introduced this rule only for scams. Thank you."

The link, while claiming to be a funeral livestream link, does have a video player, but the button to "WATCH LIVE NOW" leads to a page asking for credit card information.

"You can almost guarantee that there's a bunch that went through it," the cousin told 404 Media, adding that it terrified their grandparents, who were unsure if they had been hacked or not.

The deceased's brother was "obviously upset" at the page, but "he understands that people are scumbags," the cousin told 404 Media.

Newsweek reached out to Meta, Facebook's parent company, for further comment on these types of scams on its platform via email.

Previously, when 404 Media contacted the site about this specific fraudulent listing, a spokesperson for Facebook said: "We don't allow this content on our platforms and removed the page brought to our attention."

It is unclear what Meta's policy is for removing the accounts, but many sites host fake funeral listings, with some platforms having more than 30 at any one time.

By searching for "funeral service" on Facebook, relatives of the deceased found around 50 other scams waiting to target grieving families and friends, 404 Media reported.

Artificial Intelligence's Influence

Funeral scams of this nature have been easier to operate at a larger scale because much of the process can be automated using AI tools, according to Alex Hamerstone, advisory solutions director at TrustedSec, a leading "ethical hacking" firm.

Obituaries are public and often include all the needed funeral information to make a convincing page, which can then be sent to hundreds or thousands of a deceased person's listed Facebook friends.

"Scammers often prey on people who are in vulnerable situations," Hamerstone told Newsweek. "As terrible as it sounds, the death of a loved one can be an ideal situation for a scammer to exploit the deceased person's friends and relatives for money."

And fraudsters might not just be content to steal a one-time payment either, Hamerstone said. Many will end up using the financial information again and again and taking several payments out of victims' accounts.

"People should know that funeral livestreams do not cost money," Hamerstone said. "If you are being asked to pay for access to the livestream of a funeral, it is likely to be a scam."

How Widespread the Scams Are

Altogether, $159 billion was lost to fraud and scams last year, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Feedzai's 2023 "State of Scams" report. The online fraud, which has grown in believability due to technology like artificial intelligence, are so widespread that just under a quarter of Americans reported they had been victimized by one.

The average loss amounted to $2,663 each, and a shocking 15 percent of Americans said they encounter a scam every day. They were most often reported on Gmail and Facebook, which has become known to be a platform exploited by fraudsters who engage in the new and pervasive funeral scams.

Experts say while consumers are increasingly savvy against scams, fraudsters are learning new ways of misleading social media users, including with what appears to be a real or even AI created photographs and videos.

"Scammers are relentlessly targeting consumers and, as much as we need and want all our online services from online banking to social media, they do present more opportunities for fraudsters," Nuno Sebastião, Feedzai's co-founder and CEO, told Newsweek. "There are simply more areas of vulnerability for them to exploit."

To curb the growing problem, Sebastião said big tech companies need to take a collaborative approach with regulators, software providers and consumers.

"It feels like a big job, but it needn't be hard," Sebastião said. "Using technology that can continuously provide customer-centric risk-scoring as well as biometric and behavioral pattern analysis, we can learn each consumer's unique approach and use it to more effectively identify suspicious activity. We can prevent scams before they even happen, and without the consumer even realizing."