Tracking Down the YouTube Channel that Stole My Mom’s Obituary
Everything is profitable on the internet. Even the death of a stranger.
Roughly a week after my mom’s funeral, my manager texted me to ask if it would be okay if my employer made a donation in mom’s name. Touched by the gesture but still thinking slowly in the fog of grief, I fumbled trying to remember what charities we had listed in the obituary. My girlfriend, who selflessly guided me through each day as I transitioned back to reality, suggested I send my manager the link to mom’s obituary and let her figure out the rest.
I hastily typed “Suzanne Testani obituary” into Google and was surprised to see a YouTube link pop up as one of the top results. Assuming the funeral home uploaded footage of the services, I tapped on the link before my girlfriend could stop me.1
Instead of scenes from the inside of St. Ann’s Church, I was greeted by a 37-second clip of a man I had never seen speaking in a language I did not understand. “I hoped you wouldn’t notice this,” my girlfriend said to me. “It’s really disrespectful.” She had noticed the video herself a few days before when looking for the obituary to check what time the funeral services started.
I wasn’t upset. I was confused. Who was this man? How did he know my mom died? And why did he make a YouTube video about it? Driven partially by curiosity, partially by anger, and mostly because I knew Mom would find this all fascinating, I began researching — and after six weeks scouring the internet, this is what I’ve learned.
I decided to open my project by determining where the man behind the channel Beauty secrets was located. The language he spoke in the brief clip was vaguely familiar, with a few of the words he spoke resembling Arabic in the way Italian resembles Portuguese. Unfortunately, there were no subtitles generated by YouTube, and Arabic has many linguistic cousins, so I couldn’t be sure of his language from the YouTube post alone.
Realizing the channel Beauty secrets had posted more than 5,000 videos, I decided to peruse his video archive in case he left some clues as to his location or identity. Sorting his videos from oldest to newest, I was in luck — the second-oldest video on the channel, “Hydroquin Plus Cream Review”, included the title in a second language alongisde the English tile.
My hunch had been correct. He was speaking a language that also used the Arabic script. Pasting the text into Google Translate, it suggested Urdu as the language and told me the alternate title meant “A complete treatment of blemishes” in English, which seemed accurate. I was in business.
Unfortunately, Urdu is used in a variety of nations, stretching across Southern Asia from Afghanistan to Bangladesh, leaving me unable to determine where the man was located. I watched his video using my mom’s name a few more times to see if I could pick up on any landmarks, channeling my inner RAINBOLT, to no avail. The video was simply too short and too focused on the man’s face to provide any useful context clues.
However, after a few rewatches, it dawned on me that while I wouldn’t expect myself to understand any Urdu, I should have heard the man say “Suzanne Testani” at least once. Her name wouldn’t change from English to Urdu, and I could clearly make out two other brief snippets of English — “Hello guys, welcome back to my channel,” at the beginning, and, “Thank you so much,” at the end. So if he wasn’t talking about my mom, what was Beauty secrets saying in a video using her name?
I hired an Urdu-English translator and sent him the link to the YouTube video, asking for a direct transcription of the entire clip. The translator, Waqas, wrote back to me immediately to inform me that an English transcript would be ready in 12 hours.
Bubbling with anticipation, I was unable to peel myself away from my investigation while I waited for Waqas. I decided to revisit the oldest videos on the channel again, hopeful that they contained further hints as to how an Urdu-speaking man came to make a YouTube video about a Manlius woman’s obituary.
The channel Beauty secrets has uploaded more than 5,000 videos to YouTube since September 2023, almost all of which are extremely similar to the one I found when searching for my mom’s obituary. The bulk of his posts are between 37 and 39 seconds in length, feature the same man talking directly to the camera, and show no signs of editing or post-production.
Searching the names of the people referenced in the titles of his other videos revealed that, like my mom, these were not obituaries for famous people. All the names I checked appeared to have died recently, often with a day of Beauty secrets uploading a video about their obituary.
His only posts not in this style are the first six videos uploaded to the channel. These clips are between three and six minutes long, contain product reviews instead of obituaries, and occasionally are narrated by a woman instead of the man from the rest of the channel’s content.
These six videos also gave me a country of origin for the channel.
The product review videos each feature screen recordings that move with the speech of the narrator, meaning as he talks about a product, he opens its purchase page. Each screen recording featured the same store: Daraz, the Amazon of Pakistan.
At this point, I knew Beauty secrets spoke Urdu and lived in Pakistan. I was convinced that, as soon as Waqas wrote back to me with the transcript, I would be able to put the pieces together as to how and why a random Pakistani man had uploaded a YouTube video under my mom’s name.
Unfortunately, the transcription was borderline-meaningless. Beauty secrets never refenced my mom, even using the male pronouns when referencing the “very big celebrity who passed away today.” Worse still, Waqas, completely of his own volition — and likely curious as to why a random American wanted him to translate a YouTube video with 88 views — added a message of his own beneath the transcript.
“Please note that the channel seems to be fake as I have viewed many of the videos posted and noted that the person is speaking same words in all of his videos,” Waqas appended. “Hope you'd be satisfied with the services.”
I was not satisfied, but that was hardly the fault of Waqas. He sent me another message letting me know that he was open to additional work, so I took a chance and sent him the link to one of the product review videos from Beauty secrets in case I could glean additional insights into why the channel was was uploading dozens of 30-second American obituaries every day.
Alas, while Waqas again delivered five-star work, the second transcript was less helpful than the first. It confirmed again that Beauty secrets was located in Pakistan, but that was all. The video appears to be a genuine product review, containing no additional information about the obituary posts.I felt stuck.
However, since I had spent significant time on the Beauty secrets page, YouTube had started recommending similar channels to me, including two additional channels that had ripped my mom’s obituary — and thousands of others — in a very similar manner.
The video recommendations from YouTube convinced me that using obituaries for content was a trend, not a one-off move by Beauty secrets. The only news story I could find about the phenomenon was from Wired, and it referred to channels that appeared to read actual obituaries on camera, rather than those like Beauty secrets that used the deceased person’s name for the title then spoke about unrelated nonsense in the video.
I had better luck on Reddit, where I found multiple posts describing similar videos to the one referencing my mom in communities like Internet Mysteries and RBI (Reddit Bureau of Investigations).
One particular Reddit post stuck out to me. In addition to the YouTube videos, I had also noticed a few text-only search results appearing in queries for “Suzanne Testani obituary” from sites with names like LastInMemorial and Eternal Honoring with similar layouts, copy, and authors. And on Reddit, back in a February 2021 post by a since-deleted user asking about text-based obituary scraping, commenters were able to track down one of these sites to Pakistan using WHOIS data — the same country of origin as the Beauty secrets channel.
Finding this connection strengthened my resolve. I felt so close to putting together the entire story, assured that these text sites held the clue as to how people halfway around the world are able to upload YouTube videos using obituary information hours after the obituaries are posted in the United States.
Reality was not as simple.
To be sure, there were a few more clues in the text sites, such as an HTML comment that seemingly confirms the fake obituaries are written by tools like ChatGPT. I had been fairly confident that AI was part of the puzzle, as the fake obituaries are published mere hours after the real ones in relatively correct English syntax but full of factual errors, but it was nice to see outright confirmation. For example, the post for my mom on LastInMemorial names her husband as “John” and her “three” kids as “Michael, Sarah, and Emily.” I believe the use of AI also explains why the copy in the YouTube video description does not match the copy I used in my mom’s real obituary.
The text-based sites are littered with adware, some of which Firefox flagged as actual malware. The nefarious design of the fake obituary pages confirmed my strong suspicions as to the motivation behind the YouTube channels like Beauty secrets. At best, the obituary thieves make ad money off of each person who mistakenly clicks on a fake site. At worst, they attempt to inject vulnerable machines with harmful software like crypto miners or phishing browsers.
While YouTube channels have no known method of embedding malicious software within their uploads, they do have the potential to make money through advertising. Channels become eligible for ads once they are admitted to the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), which requires a channel to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time on its videos over the past 12 months. The YPP is available in much of the world, including Pakistan.
There is no single benchmark as to average earnings for YPP members, as YouTube is widely believed to adjust payout rates based on the genre of your channel’s content. However, the lowest range of estimates pegs ad revenue at $1.00 per thousand views (RPM), meaning cumulative views across an entire channel, not per video. In other words, a channel like Beauty secrets might average a paltry 15 views per video from confused friends and relatives, but by uploading dozens of videos each day, the page still meets ad revenue requirements.
At the time of writing, Beauty secrets has amassed 247,814 views. At the lowest likely. RPM, the channel has earned $247 just by artificially injecting itself into obituary search traffic.
A measly $247 might not seem to be worth the trouble, but when you consider the entire upload process is almost certainly automated using a web scraper, ChatGPT, and the same half dozen video files — while likely working in tandem with fake obituary sites like LastInMemorial — all the spammer has to do is recoup his initial investment before each cent of ad revenue becomes pure profit. Web scraping tools are perfectly legal, and can be found on sites like Fiverr for as low as $30. Additionally, an estimated 37.2% of all Pakistani families live on less than $3.65 per day, making YouTube ad revenue disproportionately impactful for a user like Beauty secrets.
Ultimately, I was unable to conclusively demonstrate how Beauty secrets found my mom’s specific obituary. At the same time, I am satisfied with the information I learned. I could feel my research slowly morphing from fascination to fixation, so instead of further indulging my unhealthy form of grief and stymied by the lack of further information, I decided to write up what I learned and be done.
Like me, most of the people posting to Reddit about the wave of obituary spam had recently lost a loved one. Many of them were angry with these channels and websites, feeling as though the memory of their friend or family member was being desecrated.
At first, I felt angry too. And to an extent, I still do. How dare some random person turn a profit from my dead mother’s name?
But knowing what I do now, I feel more pity than anger toward these spammers. They are so desperate to change their situations that they have resorted to squatting on the web traffic of the saddest Google searches most of us will ever have to make.
I also feel a sense of gratitude for the sense of curiousity instilled in me by mom. I know that she would have found this entire experience fascinating.
In the early stages of my research, I read the real obituaries of other people whose names Beauty secrets had used in his videos, trying to discern how he scraped the information. I won’t use their real names here to avoid adding my own post to queries for their names, but I will link to their real obituaries, as I never would have learned their life stories if it wasn’t for Beauty secrets and his bizarre spam operation.
I had the pleasure of reading about a renowned psychologist whose guidance has shaped dozens of other award winners in the field, a nurse who, even in death, clearly wanted better for her patients than what for-profit healthcare provides them, and a history teacher so beloved by his students that his entire high school closed in order to allow everyone to attend his funeral services, among many others. I hope their loved ones have found peace and comfort, and, if they ever stumble onto this story, know that these obituaries made a real impact on me.
Next time you need to find an obituary, triple-check that you’re on a legitimate site. Help older relatives do the same. Better yet, install a reliable ad blocker, because fake obituaries and YouTube clickbait are just natural extensions of the grotesque private equity monetization process playing out in the world of death, a steady march toward ever greater profits that shows no signs of stopping.
Things I Enjoyed This Week
I Was Almost Elon Musk's Twitter Voice | Defector
In Low-Turnout Election, City Candidates Found Crucial Votes at Cornell Frats | The Cornell Daily Sun
Henry Kissinger, War Criminal, Dead at 100 | Rolling Stone
The Most Civilized Way to Travel |
Thank you for reading one of the longest pieces I’ve written on this blog to date. If you made it this far, you deserve a reward. Treat yourself to two servings of dessert today.
I promise the next piece won’t have anything to do with death! Enjoy your weekend.
Most links in this post direct you to archives or mirrors of the original results to avoid providing the spammers with further ad revenue.