A closer look at retirement frauds
... and 5 steps to identify fraud websites
French national television invited me to expose AI-generated fraud sites targeting retirees. The 3-minute segment couldn't cover everything I found. Here's the full investigation.
What’s this all about?
For several months now, we’ve been seeing a rise in fake news websites put together very crudely. They all follow a very similar template and publish alarmist articles about pensions: loss of contribution quarters, supposed legislation leading to reduced benefits, and so on. And when it’s not pensions, it’s gardening…
In short, someone is clearly targeting seniors. But why?
AI-generated sites and content
Everything is fake, obviously. In fact, these sites don’t even really try to hide it. On one of them, the following notice appears at the top of every article:
“Our site is based on entirely fictional facts generated by artificial intelligence. No content should be interpreted as real or factual.”
An interesting detail: this disclaimer is displayed as an image, not as text. As a result, search engines don’t index it, and it doesn’t appear in search results. The goal is clearly to mislead readers who land on these articles coming from a search engine.
Where’s the scam?
The goal of the sites we identified is merely to generate large amounts of web traffic in order to earn advertising revenue. In that sense, it’s not strictly a scam, but rather disinformation: false information knowingly spread as such. It’s rather petty and not really worht investigating per se.
Visitors to these sites are therefore not directly at financial risk. Only their gullibility is exploited to generate ad revenue. That’s the lesser evil—but as we’ll see, it could easily go much further.
How it works
On the sites we analyzed, everything is fake: the articles, obviously, but also the “journalists,” their bios, and even their photos. After all, generative AI can do all of that, so why not use it?
Step one is to generate the most alarming articles possible on topics that matter to the target audience (here, retirees, who are often more vulnerable to digital disinformation).
Step two is to distribute this content as widely as possible to expose the target audience. The aim is to get it shared as much as possible—which explains the deliberately inflammatory themes.
To reach retirees, Facebook groups are the obvious channel. And indeed, a simple Google search such as site:facebook.com scammydomain.com shows that these articles are very frequently shared by users. And these users then express outrage in the comments, and go on sharing the false information themselves. And the cycle continues.
The operators behind these sites are actually quite good at SEO. I looked into one of them before my evening news segment, and it ranks first on Google for the query “pension seniors news”
Who’s behind this?
Potentially anyone. All it takes is an account with an online ad network to start cashing in. In that sense, it’s similar—ethically speaking—to the so-called “toxic content” monetized on YouTube.
I looked into one of these sites before yesterday’s broadcast, and it turns out to be operated by a small digital marketing company based in a small French town
That immediately explains the site’s strong search rankings.
Incidentally, I’m not surprised to find this kind of professional behind such practices. For those just joining and not yet familiar with my deep affection for digital marketing agencies, feel free to check my previous article, where I describe their harmful—and often dangerous—spam-related practices.
The domain name itself, registered only 46 days ago, appears to have previously belonged to an asbestos removal company in eastern France, whose last Facebook post dates back five years. It smells like a recovered expired domain, likely in the hope of benefiting from its previously “clean” history.
Is it illegal?
Apparently not—and that’s precisely why it’s so easy to trace the site back to its operator (and, with a bit of entry-level OSINT, to some of their clients as well).
To cover themselves, the site owner makes a point of stating at the top of each article that everything is fake. It’s clever. Beyond that, when you compare this to legitimate satire websites, which are in the business of publishing fake news, there are actually fewer differences than one might hope.
We’re likely in a grey area. The approach is clearly unethical, but not obviously illegal (I’m not a lawyer—if any legal professionals are reading, I’d welcome your take in the comments).
How to identify these sites
It’s fairly straightforward. The domain names are usually ridiculous, completely unknown, and the headlines are almost always alarmist, exploiting the classic scammer biases: urgency, fear of missing out, and—when targeting retirees—the fear of seeing their pension reduced.
Since their purpose is to maximize ad revenue, these sites are also easy to spot by the sheer volume of advertising compared to a legitimate editorial site. There’s a lot of it.
These sites also tend to be short-lived. The one I investigated had existed for only 46 days. Another similar one: 39 days. Once again, I strongly recommend checking the creation date of sites before trusting them. Tools like https://www.whatsmydns.net/domain-age are often very revealing.
Legal notices can also be a useful indicator. If they’re missing, that’s obviously a bad sign. In this case, it’s even more amusing: they are present, but list nothing except the hosting provider (which, of course, has nothing to do with the scheme—but from the scammer’s point of view it at least provides an address to display).
The rest is almost comical:
The site publisher? Simply “an independent, passionate editorial team.”
The person responsible for publication? You get a description of what a publishing director is, their role and responsibilities—but no name, obviously.
At this point, I’m inclined to blame it on AI hallucination rather than an intentional attempt at concealment, since the company behind the site is actually very easy to identify.
Why it could get worse
In this case, we’re “only” dealing with disinformation designed to attract traffic and generate advertising revenue. Ultimately, the real damage is done to social cohesion: these sites quietly fuel distrust, pessimism, and sometimes even hatred, contributing to divisions within society. They become useful idiots for genuinely malicious disinformation operations run from abroad (see the Doppelgänger campaign).
Here at least, the visitors themselves aren’t directly at risk.
However, as soon as you combine elderly people and money, the next step is unfortunately rather easy to predict.
While the sites discussed here don’t go that far, foreign-based criminal gangs certainly do. Every day, on dedicated forums and mailing lists, I see pleas for help from victims—or their families—who have lost a lifetime of savings after being persuaded to invest in a so-called “revolutionary” investment platform.
This is a massive transfer of wealth. Losses regularly reach several hundred thousand euros or dollars per victim. Some have even taken out loans to “invest more.” They’re left destitute, burdened with debt, often having lost their homes and torn their families apart.
You can clearly see how these fake news sites—relatively harmless in this specific case—could quickly become extremely dangerous bait in the wrong hands.
That’s why it’s vital to educate seniors on how to spot this kind of online deception. And that’s why I was genuinely pleased that a national TV news program took the time to shed light on this practice, even if only for a few minutes.
Now, how to avoid financial scams?
I go into much more detail on these mechanisms during presentations for my clients, but in summary:
Any unsolicited offer of investment help (coaching, mentoring, “trading signals” to copy, “investor clubs”) is almost certainly a scam—especially if it quickly moves to instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp or Telegram groups (where the victim is often alone, surrounded by bots creating the illusion that everyone is making money).
Dozens of fake trading platforms are created every day, particularly in crypto. They’re extremely convincing and appear fully functional—except that everything is fake. On-screen “profits” are virtual, and any money sent is lost the moment it’s transferred. Scammers use every possible tactic to funnel victims to these platforms: fake romances, fake advice on public forums, hijacked social media accounts posing as real friends, and so on. It’s therefore essential to invest only on well-established, reputable platforms—and to know how to identify them.
For victims who have already been scammed, any offer claiming to help recover lost funds is invariably another scam designed to extract additional fees.
The basics of verification
Check which carrier operates the contact phone number. “Exotic” or virtual operators are automatically suspicious.
How long has the website existed? Check via https://www.whatsmydns.net/domain-age. A domain that’s only weeks or months old is suspicious—especially if it was registered for just one year, the bare minimum.
Legal notices: do they clearly identify the individuals and the company behind the site and service? And is it really them? Finally, does the bank account (IBAN) used for transfers match the legal information? Any discrepancy is of course a major red flag (special mention for “investment firms” using a personal bank account).
Google. A simple search often turns up victim testimonials—or, as I recently saw during an engagement, reveals that the company is outright blacklisted by the national financial markets regulator. It doesn’t get much more red-flagged than that.
One last trick: copy a few sentences from the site and search for them verbatim on Google, in quotation marks. If the same text appears on multiple other sites under different names… that’s suspicious to say the least.
In my professional work, I’ve traced back operations of this kind and these methods have helped expose hostile campaigns. They could just as easily have prevented them—if the victims had used them. And honestly, it’s not that complicated.
And this is everything I wish I could have crammed into that short TV slot the other night but could not!