02/27/2026
More than once, we have had people coming in to see the candle they purchased on the Echovita site.
We obtain permission from families to post information on our website. We DO NOT give Echovita permission to copy it. Anything they share and sell from their site has NOTHING to do with us or any professional funeral home around us.
Please, please, please obtain your information from local funeral homes. Their information is accurate and was provided by the family directly.
In-depth article on obituary piracy.
Inside the Rise of ‘Obituary Pirates’
There was something fishy about her nephew’s obituary. Anne Marie Aikins just couldn’t put her finger on it. Kevin Patrick Krelove was a big, tall man with a huge hug and an even larger heart. So when the 44-year-old Barrie chef died earlier this month, after suffering internal injuries from a tobogganing accident, his many friends and family members were left shattered: “It was just completely unexpected and bizarre,” Aikins said.
The family was still processing their loss when, two days after his death on Feb. 7, a link to an obituary was shared among all of Krelove’s close friends and family members. It was the first result on Google, Aikins said. The website was called Echovita, and Aikins immediately felt something was off. The page didn’t belong to the funeral home and prominently featured links to purchase condolences — like paying to light a virtual candle, plant a memorial tree or send flowers to the funeral.
“I thought, ‘Geez, even funeral homes are trying to raise money,’” Aikins, the former chief spokesperson for Metrolinx, told the Star. “Your judgment can get blurred a bit because of the pain of losing somebody, especially in such a shocking way... so I ignored (the warning signs).”
It wasn’t until later that evening that the family realized the site had nothing to do with Krelove or the funeral home. His information had been copied without their consent or knowledge, they say, within minutes of the funeral home publishing its own notification. By then, multiple people had already bought flowers or paid to light candles on this copycat site, Aikins said. The idea that a stranger used her dead nephew’s personal information to sell flowers to her loved ones “infuriated” her.
“He’s young and it was such a stupid accident. That people would exploit that feels just so, so awful, it’s hard to put into words,” Aikins said. “It just compounds the tragedy that we’re experiencing and the grief.”
At first, Aikins and her family thought they were being scammed by the site, and reported it to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. Criminologists say fraudulent “obituary piracy” schemes have become more common in recent years, especially after the rise of AI. But Echovita doesn’t appear to be breaking any laws, according to lawyers and the website itself.
“Echovita has never defrauded anyone,” a spokesperson for the company told the Star, adding that its “business model complies with all applicable laws and does not contravene any regulation.” “Millions of users are thankful to Echovita for publishing death notices, categorized by city, offering a free service supported by exceptional customer care,” they said over email.
Aikins said that none of the flowers family members had bought arrived in time for Krelove’s funeral service last Friday. But according to Echovita, only two flower orders were made — one that was cancelled and refunded, and another they said was delivered in time to the funeral. Echovita’s page for Krelove was taken down after a relative filed a complaint with the website. Anyone who paid to light a virtual candle — priced from $7.99 to keep it lit for a month to $24.99 to keep it burning for “eternity” — was refunded, the spokesperson said.
What is Echovita?
Echovita calls itself a “Canadian organization that centralizes, aggregates, and amplifies publicly available obituaries to inform the public of a passing,” according to its spokesperson. “Our mission is to make public information more easily accessible, free of charge.” It does so in part by crawling the web for public obituaries posted by funeral homes and newspapers, summarizing and rewriting the information — which itself is not subject to copyright — and posting the new summaries to its own website, often without the consent of the deceased’s loved ones. It uses these posts to market paid services on its site, like flower sales, virtual candle-lightings and tree plantings.
The website’s rewriting of obituaries has caused grief for some families. One review of the company on the Better Business Bureau’s website described encountering a “terribly written” obituary of their grandfather that contained inaccurate information — including listing living relatives named in the original obituary as deceased.
“We were so embarrassed that people would think we’d written something of such poor quality to ‘honour’ our late loved one,” they said. Echovita responded to the complaint, apologizing for “any errors within the obituary.”
Its spokesperson said the services sold through its website are legitimate: “All flower orders placed on our website are either sent directly to the service the customer selects or to the delivery address they provide. In rare cases, when flowers are not delivered or are delivered late by the local florist, a refund is issued.”
And yet, the company has encountered its share of controversy — including a 2021 lawsuit from Texas-based Service Corporation International (SCI), a conglomerate of more than 1,500 funeral homes, alleging that Echovita scraped and republished copyrighted obituary details from its website.
By rewriting SCI’s obituaries, Echovita has additionally published factually inaccurate information, the suit claimed: “Plaintiffs’ monetary damages are unquantifiable but will continue to suffer damages in the form of lost business, lost goodwill, and strained customer relationships if Echovita’s conduct is allowed to continue,” the document read. Echovita is slated to appear before a Houston, Texas court this April, after an appeals court ruled the suit could proceed in the southern state.
SCI’s lawsuit identified Echovita’s CEO and president as Paco Leclerc — a man who owned and operated two other obituary aggregator websites, Everhere and the now-defunct Afterlife, it said. Afterlife shut down after a 2019 class-action lawsuit filed in Ottawa found the company repeatedly violated copyright, essentially copy-pasting photos and obituaries onto its website without consent. Justice Catherine Kane ordered Afterlife to pay the grieving families $20 million and served it an injunction for copyright infringement, writing: “Afterlife’s conduct, aptly characterized as ‘obituary piracy,’ is high-handed, reprehensible and represented a marked departure from standards of decency.”
Afterlife did not participate in the court proceedings, and its website shut down a month after the class proceeding commenced, Kane noted. All its traffic was redirected to Everhere instead: “However, the (Everhere) obituaries appear to be in a template form rather than exactly copied from the authored work,” she wrote.
Are these sites even legal? That depends on the website. “The actual scraping of content and aggregating it on a site, there’s nothing illegal about that on its face,” said David Milosevic, a lawyer and managing partner of Toronto law firm Milosevic & Associates. “The issue that raises concern is … what is the information being used for?”
As the Bereavement Authority of Ontario noted, some “obituary pirating” sites claim to be selling goods with no intention of delivering. This is fraudulent misrepresentation, Milosevic said, and should be reported to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
But websites like Echovita don’t appear to be breaking any laws, Milosevic said, as they look to be selling a legitimate service and are only summarizing public information from obituaries. In cases like these, your best bet is to ask the website to take the post down — sites like Echovita promise to remove or modify any post when asked. But, because Canadian websites are not legally obligated to remove public information — which obituaries generally are — they don’t have to take it down if no laws are being broken, Milosevic said.
A recent petition to the House of Commons, however, is looking to change things. Backed by Winnipeg-based Liberal MP Doug Eyolfson, the petition calls for the ban of any modification of an obituary without the explicit consent of the author or the person responsible for it. It also seeks to ban “any form of sales, donations, or other financial transaction” not explicitly mentioned in the obituary.
The petition, which opened for signatures last November, has attracted more than 2,000 signatures — meaning it will be presented to the House of Commons once it closes on Feb. 26 and receives certification.
Why ‘obituary pirates’ are becoming more common
We unfortunately don’t have data tallying reports of fraud from obituary “pirates” — only that “they, unfortunately, are very common,” according to criminologist Benoit Dupont, a professor at the Université de Montréal. These schemes have existed for years, he said, but the recent popularization of AI and large language models has turbo-charged this industry. Where previous pirates were copying obits by hand, now we have AI programs sifting through thousands of pages in seconds, automating the whole process.
“It makes it so that you can do something at scale — and you only have to attract a few people to make it profitable overall,” said Kami Vaniea, a cybersecurity expert and associate professor at the University of Waterloo. “I think you’re going to see a lot of problems like this pop up as AI becomes more prevalent,” Vaniea continued. “It costs so little to put up a website, if even one person sends flowers, that’s a profit.”
Through clever search engine optimization, sites like Echovita often appear before the official obituary in Google Search results, leading loved ones to believe the deceased was associated with the third-party site, Dupont added.
That’s how it managed to reach some of Krelove’s loved ones, Aikins said: “If you do an AI search (for Krelove’s name), all that comes up is this stupid website” — or it did until Echovita removed his obituary. The website “may be operating within the law,” she said, “but that doesn’t make it ethical.
