The expulsion of six Indian diplomats from Canada, following allegations from the RCMP that the India's diplomatic corps was involved in extortions and even murders within Canada’s borders, has provoked a still-developing international crisis.

But that crisis must seem especially chaotic to online readers of Canada’s news publications who were told last Wednesday that Canada’s most well-known Sikh political figure, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, had died on live television.

Image: One of the ads falsely announcing Jagmeet Singh's death, spotted on the Edmonton Journal website shortly after 8:00am October 9.

Publications including the Edmonton Journal, the Calgary Herald, the Vancouver Sun and the Toronto Star started serving up the image some time in the early morning of October 9. Our first sighting here at the Progress Report was on an Edmonton Journal article, shortly after 8:00am MST.

We started investigating right away, thinking this was only a local media problem. But it wasn’t long before users were reporting their own sightings across Alberta and across the country.

Mr. Singh, of course, is alive and well. Which demands asking: why were the websites of Canada’s largest news companies claiming otherwise?

Well, the answer is fairly simple: they were being paid to.

Want to run a hoax in the Herald? Just get out your credit card

It’s not a secret that many of Canada’s news operations are struggling to stay afloat.

Revenue for big players like Postmedia and TorStar are sinking steadily, and some owners appear more set on raiding their news company assets for cash than on righting the ship.

One way many companies are seeking to bail themselves out is by turning up their online advertising—and the biggest and most trusted provider of that is also the operator of the world’s most visited website, Google.

Each of the false Jagmeet Singh death announcements we encountered, and each of the ones reported to us that we were able to verify, were in sections of the affected websites’ templates marked as holders for Google ads.

Image: Another instance of the hoax ad spotted in a Google ad frame on the website of The Independent, a British publication, on October 11.

Tracking every affected publication’s response to the incident was beyond our means, but we did at least keep an eye on the National Post, the Edmonton Journal, the Calgary Herald and the Toronto Star. At no point while the false death announcement was doing the rounds did we see any of these publications turn the page elements containing the Google advertisements off.

That is to say: for several hours after the ads were first spotted, all of these publications were continuing to accept payment to continue running the ads.

While we stopped seeing the ads on Albertan news sites by the afternoon of the 9th, they continued to run on other websites well into Friday evening. When we reached out to Google they promptly provided us with a great deal of background information about what had happened.

They weren’t ads that Google wanted to be running, the Google rep explained to us.

The ads did violate Google’s own policies on what is acceptable to run on their network.

“We have strict policies that govern the type of ads we allow on our platform, and our enforcement teams are constantly monitoring ads to ensure that bad actors do not deceive users,” Google’s spokesperson told the Progress Report.

“When we find ads that violate our policies we take immediate action, including removing the ad, as we did in this case. We are investing heavily in our detection and enforcement against scam ads that impersonate public figures and the bad actors behind them.”

But with no one at the news companies actually reviewing these ads before they run, it appears that all it takes to get away with breaking these policies—at least for a few days—is a little luck and a credit card.

Who would want you to think Jagmeet was dead, anyway?

While monitoring social media for more reports of the ads last week we saw many posters theorize that this might be political meddling from a foreign actor. But picking up the threads of the scam, we found something much more mundane.

These Jagmeet Singh announcements were not ‘fake ads,’ as described in the Toronto Star, the only mainstream publication we’ve seen even attempt to explain what happened to their readers. While the text of the ads was a lie, they were, genuinely, ads; they were indeed advertising something and trying to sell it.

Readers who clicked were first sent to a false mockup of a Toronto Star article in which Jagmeet Singh—miraculously back on his feet—was now in trouble for leaking a financial hack that the banks just don’t want you to know about. You can probably see where this is going.

Image: The hoax death announcement ads linked to this landing page, a fake Toronto Star article which enticed the reader to purchase cryptocurrency.

Readers falling for that story were then directed to sign up for a cryptocurrency exchange called ‘Fargo Investor’—not to be confused with, but likely intended to be confused with, the well-known bank Wells Fargo.

Enter the chumbox

Publishers relying on Google—the largest and perhaps most reputable operator in the online ad space—may have legitimately been blindsided by having something as seedy as the Jagmeet ads served up.

But for two of Canada’s largest news providers, this content is surprisingly standard ad fare.

Those companies are Global and Postmedia, and they don’t just top up their revenue with Google ads. Global and Postmedia also run what’s called ‘the chumbox.’

You can see one right now if you’d like to read along: open a Global or Postmedia news story online and scroll to the bottom. There you’ll encounter a sort of grid layout containing both internal (that is, to other Global or Postmedia content) links, and also ads to external content.

It’s likely that within one or two reloads, you’ll quickly encounter a scam.

While the Google ads higher in the story tend to be for relatively high-profile and reputable clients, the chumbox gets everything else. Reviewing the chumboxes under a few articles in the Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald last week, the Report found among other things

• A company offering to sell Microsoft Office licenses at an incredible discount, which users on several tech forums complained had scammed them;
• Advertisements for treatments for “leaky gut,” a term of pseudo-science which is not medically accepted;
• Advertisements for herbal mouse repellants, broadly derided by the pest control industry as a con;
• And more than anything else, financial operations targeting seniors.

Image: A chumbox ad served up to us in the footer of this Edmonton Journal article on October 10, which linked out to an MFA site about "leaky gut syndrome."

Just like the Jagmeet ad, many of these chumbox links led to made-for-advertisement (MFA) sites that falsely made themselves out to be genuine news stories or blog posts. 

Like the Jagmeet ad, most employed a bait-and-switch; one ad targeting seniors we reviewed, for example, offered information about a benefit that seniors might qualify for. The ad links to a fake MFA blog which abandons the topic of a benefit, instead promising information about a new policy for seniors, which was itself a second fake-out; the next page is simply selling life insurance. 

Postmedia gets their chumbox mostly from Taboola, the industry leader. Taboola is a massive and still-growing operation with a market cap over $1 billion. Global gets theirs mostly from Taboola’s main competitor, the comparatively-scrappy quarter-billion-dollar Outbrain.

The MFA sites themselves are extremely lucrative, and armed with sophisticated analytics and tracking technology are constantly refining their persuasion tactics. Some keep it above board; others, like whoever was telling us that Jagmeet Singh had died, aren’t so scrupulous. 

With that hustler-evolutionary process bubbling away down in the muck, its breach into the trusted space of the Google ads may just have been a matter of time.

Indeed, the Jagmeet Singh death ads have a pretty obvious lineage: nearly the exact same landing page copy was used in the MFA fake news articles linked to from similar hoax clickbait earlier this year about Mary Berg and Sidney Crosby. In August, Luke LeBrun from Press Progress documented what was probably the intermediary evolutionary step, except the MFA blogs were being posted directly to Twitter.

We reached out to the editors in chief at the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald asking what measures they were taking to avoid publishing false claims of major political figures' deaths in the future, and also whether they felt that the content in their chumboxes was appropriate to publish alongside the news, but they did not respond.