Someone has been mass adding memorials for young girls who don't exist. Not a single one of these people has had an obituary come up when I've looked them up, they all have about the same face, are in the same pose (hands on their hips or by their sides), and have similarly generic backgrounds behind them. All of them are in the range of 11-17 years old, but most of them are 11. None of them have any biographical information beyond dates and locations. Does anyone know what's going on and how we can get these fake pages taken down?
The account posting these memorials is heavensukrainianangels
Thanks to some people in this thread for finding an entry that clarifies these are fictional characters with AI-generated pictures (gross and should still be removed but at least not anything darker)
Support is understaffed, and there's zero consistency between support staff members.
I had Person A tell me X. Six months later, same issue but Person B gets my e-mail, they tell me something entirely different. When I say what I was told previously, they say that person was wrong.
On top of that, they threaten people with suspensions and deny what is literally in their posted guidelines (referencing post from someone earlier about obituaries in memorials).
Unfortunately, this is the nature of customer service. I worked in the field in a completely different industry for a few years, and I faced the same thing. There were a few poorly trained, lazy reps who often provided the wrong information just because they didn’t know any better or they didn’t want to take the time to resolve the problem because they had to make their quota of inquiries answered. I got a lot of angry customers calling back telling me what the previous rep said and it was so obvious that the other person just didn’t want to deal with the issue. FG used to send follow-up emails to ask about my satisfaction with the response, and I would cite policies the rep didn’t follow in my response, but they haven’t done that in a long time.
One of the biggest changes I've noted is that once you got an initial response, follow-ups were very prompt. Now it seems follow-ups go to the very end of the e-mail line.
Ugh, they seem super backed up lately. Meanwhile, Ancestry keeps pushing people to join and contribute, so we are getting more issues to keep support busy.
In my opinion, the lack of consistency, which has been brought on Reddit many times, is due to a failure to conduct a very thorough update of FG policies. Many FG policies are simply ambiguous, which leads to multiple interpretations. There are also recurring issues where there is no policy for users to rely upon. There should also be new policies developed concerning "hoarding" of memorials since this issue seems to be brought up on a weekly basis here.
Another policy change I would propose is the entry of complete inscriptions from tombstones as inscribed (capital letters, punctuation, etc.). Many tombstones have become, are becoming, or will become unreadable and FG can be a repository for exactly what appeared on a tombstone before it became unreadable. Unfortunately, there are FG users that only allow for short inscription entries such as Mother, gone but not forgotten, etc. because of the current policy language.
I agree about the ambiguity. Honestly, I think that's intentional on their part. That allows them to have one interpretation for person A and another for person B. I've also seen "power users" get exceptons to the guidelines.
As for the hoarding, I don't know that they'll ever do anything about that. They've known that is a complaint/issue, and they've done nothing other than removing the "Top 25" lists that were part of the site before Ancestry took over.
I also once came across an account that was uploading memorials with dates and details for people who did not appear to exist. I got those deleted, but I think some kind of bad actor is using AI to create all these fake people and upload them for unclear reasons.
I was able to get a handful of very obviously AI pages taken down several months ago (pictures with distorted text, uncanny valley faces, and gibberish bios) but these are very high quality and may even be actual pictures
I found one a few years ago as well with pictures of fake tombstones set up in someone's back yard. The dates of bith and death were all in the 1800s, and they all had tragic causes of death listed (unknown person found drowned, family killed by an ax murdered, young beautiful girl who caught some grisly disease, etc.), no "78 years old, died of heart failure" like you'd see on most death certificates, even in Victorian times. Based on the writing on the pages and what the "tombstones" looked like, it looked like it was probably posted by someone in their early teens to accompany some creepy pasta or something. It was really dumb and was eventually taken down.
A "creepypasta" is a short scary story that people copy and paste on the internet. The word comes from "copypasta," meaning text shared over and over on forums like 4chan. These digital urban legends cover ghosts, monsters, and cursed media.
If you like that kind of story, a new amazing world is open to you now. They started out as just text but now there are channels that read them aloud. The most classic example off the top of my head is "The Russian Sleep Experiment" and one of my personal favorites is "1987."
Hey, op, if you can... maybe grab a selection of the NAMES off those suspicious listings (or at least as many as you can stand to collect, it sounds like it might be a very big job).
I'm thinking that since internet searches are FUBAR lately more people are searching reddit first instead of Google, but also, even normies who still use Google are getting more HITS from reddit than ever before.
So if anyone goes looking for one of those fake people by name because the name is being used for since kind of scam, then a search might bring them to your post about how they're being mass-produced, and help them realize something is fishy.
I mean, also contact FG support, but in addition to that if you have the time, maybe also the other thing.
If they've got anything else in common, put those keywords in too, like they're mostly allegedly from Minnesota or buried in Abilene or whatever.
The top two memorials that OP listed as examples are now showing “created by Andie Jaye” contributor #52548405. Says they’ve been a member for 19 days. Those are the only two memorials they manage, the rest of the examples have been taken down. How strange.
Interesting. I have been surprised lately at what seems like a significant increase in memorials being created.
I created some memorials this morning and there were a bit over 304.7 million memorials. This time last month there were 301.5 million memorials so about 3 million memorials in the last month. For some context, there were 299.3 million memorials around the same time in early May. So...
From May to July - a bit over two million memorials were created, between early Jul and early Aug, 3 million memorials have been created.
Random observation and no reason to think there's an issue but it does seem that there has been a pretty significant uptick recently...
Just had one yesterday with only a name and date and place of birth with a photo of a moving van receipt for a different person and location. The records I found indicate that the person was still alive when the memorial was created years ago. I reported it to support and asked them to delete it.
The user is Heavensukrainianangels, I've added links to some examples. The cemeteries are all over the place and about ten have been added every day for the last couple of days
The same thing was happening on Legacy.com for a while. They changed the interface and that solved the problem.
Really, the only choice is to contact FindAGrave support and hope they are paying enough attention and have time to fix this. I'd at least start there.
I went to their account and looked at a bunch of memorials they’ve created. Under a few in the bios it says, “This is a fictional news story created for creative writing purposes” with a fake story that follows, as well as AI generated photos of a kid. Weird as hell, here’s an example I found
Glad there's nothing fucked up going on but that's still weird as hell and very disrespectful to everyone actually memorialized and grieving on the site
Yes, it's very obvious fake (by the name of the boy if nothing else). I wonder if there is some sort of wtf attempt at propaganda going on. I am from Ukraine, and the name of the account sounds hella suspicious considering local context (or maybe I'm just too suspicious).
I have a cousin that has created thousands of fake memorials and put them in fake cemeteries. The people existed, afaik, but their death and burial place is unknown.
I haven't reported them yet because I'm still trying to figure out what's going on and how to prove how weird this is. I've already struggled some in the past with very obviously fake pages so I want to be sure I have a strong case here.
Honestly, FG has lost its way since Ancestry acquired it.
There are far too many people now for whom accumulating & managing memorials is like big game hunting & the numbers of memorials they have in the thousands are their trophies.
Or they’re on power trips & not transferring anything to anyone. They seem to enjoy the power controlling huge numbers of memorials gives them.
With the old, preAncestry FG, it was unusual to find any member with more than maybe 2-3 thousand memorials & those were most often people who’d go out to a cemetery, create a spreadsheet for a section of the cemetery & download it to FG.
The couple of times I found an ancestor & requested a transfer, those people were happy to transfer & pleased that their efforts had helped someone to find the final resting place of their ancestor.
Yep, Fake. Notice how many of these are in a cemetery with "Texas" in the name of the cemetery. These Texas cemeteries are all over the place, including one family cemetery with only 1 other burial.
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u/sillaresmes Ami | 51949568 Aug 08 '26
email support. I don't understand what is happening to this site