Funeral Livestream and Obituary Scams: How They Work

Funeral livestream scams are fake social media profiles and groups that copy a dead person's photo and funeral details, then post a link to "watch the service live." The link leads to a payment page. There is no stream. The aim is your card details, and often a hidden subscription. ITV News found hundreds of these fake profiles on Facebook in May 2025. Funeral directors in the UK say they generally do not charge mourners to watch a stream at all (BBC, 19 March 2024).

So if you saw a "watch live" link for a funeral and searched to check it, here is the short answer. If it came from a profile you do not know, and it asks for card details, do not use it. Ask the family or the funeral director for the real link.

The livestream trick is one of four scams that now follow a death online. The others are fake donation pages, callers pretending to be the funeral home and "obituary piracy." This page explains how each one works, who profits, and the simple plan that protects your family.

An hour before the funeral

Imagine your old school friend's father has died. The funeral is at 11 o'clock, two hundred miles away. You cannot get there. At 10 a.m., a friend request arrives. The profile picture is your friend's father, smiling at a barbecue. The post says: "Watch the funeral service live. Please share with family and friends."

You feel a rush of relief. You can be there after all. You click. The page asks for your card, "to confirm your location." It is only a small amount. You do not want to bother your friend today of all days. So you type in the numbers.

That is almost exactly what happened to a friend of one bereaved son in England. She lost about £7. She did not want to disturb him while he was mourning. "It's very easy and very smart for them to do that," he told ITV News. "To catch people in a very vulnerable state" (ITV News, 27 May 2025).

The scam works because it is aimed at love. People want to say goodbye. Who stops to check a link at a moment like that?

Scam 1: the fake funeral livestream

This is the most common one. Here is how it works, step by step, from published investigations.

1. Copy the notice. A funeral director or family posts a memorial message on Facebook. Almost every time, the BBC reported, scammers respond within minutes with a fake profile using the dead person's photo and details. "It's a nightmare," said a funeral director in Darlington whose posts were targeted (BBC).

2. Reach the mourners. The fake profile sends friend requests to relatives and friends, often in the hours before the service, ITV found. Others post comments under the real notice. Malwarebytes recorded one comment that read: "UPDATE POST: If you can afford you can donate. Please share family and friends ... WATCH LIVE" (Malwarebytes Labs, 23 August 2024).

3. Send you to a "stream." The link opens a landing page with "watch" buttons. In the case Malwarebytes followed, every button led to a phishing site.

4. Ask for your card. The page asked for an email address to sign up for "your favorite movies." Then it asked for card details "to verify your geographic location."

5. Hide the real price. The page said membership cost only €2. But a tiny, pre-ticked line at the bottom said: "I consent and accept the conditions of the membership and would like a secondary membership. 2X recurring payments every 14 days, current rate (64 €)."

6. There is no stream. You never see the funeral. Some people may even miss the real service because they think it is being streamed, KrebsOnSecurity noted.

A small charge is deliberate. The fraudsters charge small amounts to catch as many people as possible, ITV reported. Malwarebytes also warned that card details are likely to be sold on to other criminals.

Scam 2: the fake donation page

The same fake profiles often ask for money "for the family." Malwarebytes found this was the second common approach. KrebsOnSecurity found fake funeral groups that "request donations in the name of the deceased" (KrebsOnSecurity, 18 September 2024).

The National Association of Funeral Directors gives clear advice. Be "extremely wary of any external links supposedly promoting a livestream, fundraising or asking for donations," said its communications lead, Nick Britten. "Always check with the family or the funeral director to see whether it is legitimate" (BBC).

Scam 3: the fake funeral home caller

This one targets the family directly.

In June 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission warned of impostors who "pretend to be from the funeral home and say that, unless the family pays more money immediately, the funeral will be canceled." The FTC called it a candidate for a "Scammers Hall of Shame" (FTC Business Blog, 15 June 2023).

The FTC's advice is simple:

• Resist the pressure. Honest businesses give you time.
• Call the funeral home yourself, on a number you already know. The FTC suggests the one on the funeral home's General Price List.
• Watch how they want to be paid. "Never pay someone who insists you pay with a wire transfer, cryptocurrency, or a gift card."

One reader replied under the FTC's post that scammers had called her father the day before. She called the funeral home directly. "It is really happening right here in our hometown," she wrote.

Scam 4: obituary piracy and AI obituaries

This scam earns money from attention and advertising.

When someone dies, people search their name. "Obituary pirates" know this. They copy death notices from funeral home websites and news reports, rewrite them, often with AI tools, and publish them on websites full of adverts (The Verge, 12 February 2024).

The harm is real:

• Wrong details. Some sites give the wrong date or place for the service. Mourners may go to the wrong place.
• Lost flowers. Some take orders for flowers or gifts that do not arrive in time, a funeral marketing expert told The Verge.
• Fake deaths. In January 2024, AI-written obituaries and videos announced the death of Los Angeles Times writer Deborah Vankin. She was alive, reading them in a hospital waiting room. "Reading your own obituary is a surreal experience," she told CNN (CNN, 19 March 2024).
• Buried truth. The pirate pages can outrank the real notice, so friends find the fake version first.

Why do it? Obituaries draw huge traffic. "For most funeral home websites, obituaries account for 80% to 85% of all visitors," one funeral marketing firm told CNN. A pirate needs a lot of obituaries to make real money from ads, so they publish at scale.

In March 2024, Google changed its spam policies. A Google spokesperson told CNN: "With our recent updates to our search spam policies, we've significantly reduced the presence of obituary spam in search results."

The money machine

Put the four scams side by side and the business model is clear.

Scam	What they take	How they get it
Fake livestream	Card details, a trial fee, hidden repeating charges	A copied profile and a "watch live" link
Fake donation page	Direct payments	Copied photos and a story about "the family"
Fake funeral home call	Large urgent payments by wire, crypto or gift card	A phone call or text at the worst moment
Obituary piracy	Advertising money, sometimes flower orders	Copied notices, often rewritten by AI

The costs to scammers are tiny. Funeral notices are public. Photos are on public profiles. A web page costs a few dollars. "There's very low startup costs for this," a computer science professor told CNN. "And it can pay some revenue, so there's an incentive to do it."

How the warnings built up

Funeral streams became common during the pandemic, when lockdowns kept mourners apart. Trading standards officers say the scams have risen since then (ITV News). Here is how the public record grew.

• 15 June 2023. The FTC warns US funeral homes about impostors demanding payment from families.
• September 2023. Meta lets Facebook users add extra profiles to one account.
• 12 February 2024. The Verge documents AI-written obituary spam.
• March 2024. Google updates its spam policies. CNN reports fake obituaries for living people.
• 19 March 2024. The BBC reports UK funeral directors fighting fake stream profiles.
• 23 August 2024. Malwarebytes publishes a step-by-step walk-through of one fake stream.
• 18 September 2024. KrebsOnSecurity traces fake streaming sites to one hosting network.
• 27 May 2025. ITV News finds hundreds of scam profiles and challenges Meta.

Three years of warnings, and the pattern has barely changed. That tells you something. The platforms will not catch every fake in time. The protection that works is a family that knows the plan.

Who is behind these scams

Here we keep to what has been published. We do not name private people.

What investigators found. KrebsOnSecurity traced one fake streaming site, linked from a real family's fake funeral group, to a small web-hosting network in Bangladesh. The same server hosted nearly 6,000 other domains. Many of them advertised "live streams" of all kinds of events, from funerals to graduations, weddings and even a town's police community night. The people Krebs identified did not respond to his questions (KrebsOnSecurity).

Malwarebytes told ITV that some domains it examined were also traced to Bangladesh, but warned that it is often hard to know exactly where scammers operate.

What experts say. Katherine Hart of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute told ITV the problem has grown over four years. "To me, this has all the hallmarks of a serious organised crime group."

What the platforms say. Families told ITV they reported scam profiles to Facebook and were told the profiles did not break its rules. After ITV contacted Meta, it removed them. A Meta spokesperson said: "We don't allow fraudulent activity on our platforms and have removed the accounts brought to our attention. We are continually investing in protections against fraud." Meta did not explain why the first reports were refused (ITV News).

Malwarebytes suggested one Facebook feature may help scammers: since September 2023, users can add up to four extra profiles to one account, with any name they choose.

What is unknown. Nobody has published how many people lose money this way, or how much. No prosecution for a funeral livestream scam had been reported in the sources we checked.

Red flags you can check yourself

For mourners and guests:

1. Who sent the link? If it is a stranger, a new profile or a profile using the dead person's photo, stop. A real link usually comes from the family or the funeral director.
2. Does it ask for money or card details? A funeral stream should be free. "The webpage will not ask you to supply any personal information," and "access will be free," says the streaming provider Obitus.
3. Does the comment look odd? Words like "UPDATE POST," poor spelling of the name and urgent "WATCH LIVE" buttons are common signs.
4. Is the web address strange? Look at the domain before you click. Fake stream sites have used addresses ending in .xyz and other unusual endings.
5. Can you check in one message? Send a short text to someone close to the family, or call the funeral director. It takes a minute. Families would rather you ask.

For the family:

6. Is someone calling you to demand payment? Hang up. Call the funeral home on the number on your paperwork.
7. Is the obituary you found the real one? Check the funeral home's own website. If a pirate site has wrong details, tell close friends where the real notice is.

A plan that protects your family

Scammers move fast because families are busy. The answer is to decide a few things before the day, ideally before anyone dies.

Decide whether the service will be streamed. If it will, the funeral director can give you one official link. "If a funeral is being livestreamed, a funeral director will always be able to provide the correct link," the NAFD says.

Say it in the notice. Ask the funeral director to add one line to the online notice. Either "This service is not being livestreamed," or "The only official stream is at [link on our website]." Several funeral homes now do this, Malwarebytes reports.

Name a "comment guardian." Choose one calm, online person, a cousin or a friend. On the day, their job is to watch the notice, report fake profiles and comments to Facebook, and warn family groups.

Share less in public. Put the essentials in public posts. Share the rest, such as home details or private family information, only in private messages.

Pay the funeral home in a traceable way, and save its number from the price list in your phone. Then a fake caller is easy to spot.

Know what to do if someone pays. Call the card provider at once. Block the card. Ask about repeating charges and check statements for weeks. Report it to Action Fraud in the UK or ReportFraud.ftc.gov in the US. Report the profile to Facebook.

The honest lesson

These scams work best on families who have not decided anything yet. They feed on the gap between a death and a plan.

Thinking about your own funeral can feel heavy. But there is peace in it, too. Death is part of every life, and preparing for it calmly is a gift to the people you love. You can decide now whether you want your service streamed, who will share the link, and who will guard the comments. You can even write your own obituary, with the facts right, so nobody needs to copy anything.

Your online life matters here as well. Our guide on who gets your photos, voice and messages when you die shows how to set legacy contacts on Facebook, Google and Apple, and how to protect your family from voice-clone scams.

Our free end-of-life readiness check takes a few minutes and shows what is missing from your plans. The Complete Planning Library has a funeral and memorial planning sheet, a digital life inventory and scripts for hard phone calls. It costs $39, once, with a 30-day refund. It will not stop every scammer on the internet. It will make sure the people you trust know the real plan.

If you are arranging a funeral now, you may also want to read Funeral Home Price Tricks: What the FTC Funeral Rule Says. It covers the pricing tactics some funeral businesses use themselves.

The scams do not stop after the funeral. Fake lawyer letters and forged wills target estates in the months that follow: see Heir Hunter and Unclaimed Inheritance Scams After a Death.