Intellectual Property Law

This Just In: Fake News Sites Are Great!

By Kevin Poulsen

There’s something icky about the fake news ads showing up on genuine news sites like Salon, Slate and Huffington Post. Are things really so bad that we’ll let scammers use the tropes of journalism to lure consumers into shady deals?

If I don’t like it,  I can always quit the business and earn $1,700 a week posting links on Google. I know this because I recently saw this headline on Huffington Post: “How I Make $1700 a Week Posting Links on Google.”

That “News5Alert” ran in a rotating ad spot on HuffPost last week, though it was not identified as an ad. Clicking on it took you to a story from “News 5″ in Sacramento — which is not a TV station — revealing how one Mary Steadman now makes $6,500 a month working from home, thanks to an internet course called Google Home Income.

The story has art, it has a sidebar, there’s weather, supposed reader comments — even ads. Steadman is described as “a mother from San Francisco” — at least, when I read the article. Thanks to cutting-edge reporting techniques perfected by News 5, she will automatically move to the geolocation of your internet IP address when you read it. Look, she lives right in your neighborhood!

Salon displayed a similar ad yesterday, showing a newspaper clipping with the headline, “Can You Really Work Online at Home? We Investigate This Trend.”

Click through the Salon ad, and John B. Guiseman’s story at the Miami Gazette News reports glowingly — but with a convincing patina of journalistic distance — about software called Easy Google Profits. The reader comments below the article are also laudatory, though many happen to be identical to comments on the News 5 piece, just with different names.

It turns out there’s a whole fake-media empire pushing the story of the massive profits to be made by gaming Google from home: The Boston Weekly News, USA Financial Post, America Finance News, New York Finance News, Ohio Business News, the New York Tribune News, the Bakersfield Gazette, the San Jose Times, and the prestigious New York City Hearld. No, not “Herald”; Hearld.

Mary Steadman appears in most of the fake stories, sometimes shown on the cover of Riches magazine, or in a still frame from a notional TV newscast. Steadman is variously reported as owing her windfall to Google Cash Club, the Google Biz Kit, Google Automated Income, Google Cash and an endless series of similar mail or internet business courses or software, all sold by different companies, which, one suspects, are really all the same. In some stories, Samantha Cafferty is the lucky entrepreneur, though the details of the story are the same.

Consumers who have signed up for the $2 trial have reported being hit with surprise charges on their credit cards ranging from $70 to $80. When they call the company to complain, they’re told that they agreed to the charges in the terms-of-service on the website, which they surely read.

You’re in for a similar treatment if you visited Slate yesterday, and were persuaded by the report from “News 3″ — which looks to be, but isn’t, an ABC affiliate — about a miracle anti-aging pill called Resveratrol Ultra.

In it you learn that veteran TV reporter and health specialist Katie Wilson started off as a Resveratrol Ultra skeptic. But when her “news director” asked her to do a story on the wonder drug, she tried it herself. “I can say with the utmost certainty that this is a feel good story for the ‘ages’!,” she concluded. Just look at how youthful and vibrant she is holding that TV microphone!

If you sign up for the free sample, the company will start charging about $80-a-month to your credit card, unless you cancel. That’s from Forbes, which is even more reliable than the New York City Hearld.

Full post as published by Threat Level on June 25, 2009 (boomark / email).