MemorialSuite Publishes a Reference on Fake-Obituary Scams and Names Its Own Industry's Incentive

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. — MemorialSuite has published a free reference page on fake obituaries, covering the six distinct practices families are running into: scraped death notices republished on unrelated sites, AI-expanded fakes built from a short social media post, obituary pages used as bait for adware and fake virus warnings, synthetic-voice tribute videos uploaded before a family has finished arranging the funeral, fake funeral livestreams that ask for a card, and the use of an obituary as research for a later approach by telephone.

The page is at memorialsuite.com/fake-obituary-scams. Every factual claim on it is attributed to published reporting or a primary source, including Google's March 2024 announcement that it was updating its spam policies to keep obituary spam out of Search, research by the Secureworks Counter Threat Unit that traced a single February 2024 obituary onto six scam sites within 48 hours, a July 2025 WKYT investigation in which a father found several fake obituaries for his 18-year-old son, and Malwarebytes' documentation of a fake funeral livestream whose small print concealed a recurring subscription.

The page also carries something companies in this category do not usually say out loud. MemorialSuite argues that the reason fake memorial pages are so hard for families to identify is that they closely resemble the legitimate product: a public page carrying the name of a person who has just died, positioned to catch the brief but intense burst of searches that a death produces.

“Nearly every product in this category, including ours if we had built it the obvious way, wants a public page carrying the name of someone who has just died, because that page catches the search traffic a death generates. The people running fake obituary sites want exactly the same thing. They are not imitating some fringe practice — they are imitating the normal business model, which is why they are so difficult for a grieving family to tell apart.”

“We decided to publish nothing at all: no memorial page, no guest book, no donation collection. That started as a way of avoiding obligations we did not want in a first version, and it turned out to remove the incentive entirely. I would rather say that plainly than claim we solved it on principle.”

— Dr. Bo Bennett, Founder, MemorialSuite

MemorialSuite does not host such pages. The service asks a family the questions a funeral director would ask, then produces an obituary in newspaper and web versions, a printable funeral program and a eulogy with delivery notes, delivered as downloadable files. There is no public memorial page, no guest book, no candle or flower sales and no donation collection, so there is nothing for the company to gain from anybody searching for the name of the person who died.

The reference page includes a nine-point list of warning signs, a seven-step method for checking whether a memorial page is genuine, guidance on reporting a fake one, and a section on which conventional obituary details — full date of birth, mother's maiden name, home addresses — are worth omitting deliberately, drawing on AARP's guidance about obituary-sourced identity theft.

MemorialSuite is available for comment on the record, including on the uncomfortable part of the subject. The reference page may be quoted freely with attribution.

About MemorialSuite. MemorialSuite is a product of Archieboy Holdings, LLC, of Marlborough, Massachusetts. It prepares an obituary, a printable funeral program and a eulogy from a single guided intake for a one-time $79, with a free private preview before payment and a 14-day refund. It publishes nothing online.