Since 2004, more than 2,000 newspapers have closed in the United States, and many local news outlets are struggling to build a digital business. But one remarkable success story is the Albany Daily News, a website that clocked nearly 10 million pageviews in August, roughly five times that of the 160-year-old Albany Times Union newspaper, according to analytics service SimilarWeb.

The most popular news site in Albany has a simple secret to success: Fake just about everything and rake in the advertising dollars.

The Albany Daily News is an empty husk of a website filled with old content that for months was showered with questionable traffic as part of a digital ad fraud scheme, according to new research from Social Puncher, an ad fraud prevention consultancy.

The Albany site has a Canadian counterpart, City of Edmonton News, that’s generated more pageviews than authentic local news operations such as the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun, according to SimilarWeb. Those two were recently joined by another fake local site, the Laredo Tribune, which began receiving significant traffic in September. There’s also a now-dormant site called the Stanton Daily whose domain now redirects to the Albany site.

“It’s remarkable — who said local news is dead, right?” said Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, after examining two of the sites and their analytics for BuzzFeed News.

The Albany and Edmonton sites have not been updated in months, have no employees associated with them, and list no larger corporate entity. Their homepages are filled with bland, out-of-date rewrites of local stories first reported by real news outlets. Beyond the homepage, the sites are chock-full of old celebrity content that has nothing to do with the cities they supposedly cover. They do not have active social media accounts, nor do they list an office address or any contact details.

“You’d think they would do a better job of hiding their non-reality,” Benton said.

And yet, based on their traffic and digital ad rates, the Albany and Edmonton sites at their peak may have earned more revenue from programmatic ads than the leading news outlets in these cities.

The sites, whose ultimate beneficiary is unknown, provide yet another example of how the digital ad industry is being ravaged by dubious schemes and outright fraudsters who steal money from brands by causing ads show up on sites and apps with fake or manipulated audiences, among other techniques. The fake local sites also illustrate a painful irony that while authentic local news outlets in the US and Canada struggle with business challenges, there’s apparently plenty of money or influence to be gained by masquerading as one.

“The amount of reliable, verified, timely, independently produced local news is on the decline, and everywhere you turn you're running into garbage like this,” said April Lindgren, a professor at Toronto’s Ryerson School of Journalism who runs the Local News Research Project.

A related trend is the emergence of local news sites in the US that are run by politicians or are closely linked to political causes or entities. Snopes revealed a network of local news sites being run by people closely associated with a PAC, while a Michigan newspaper recently reported on the emergence of a network of close to 40 new sites that present themselves as local news operations. During the 2016 election, Russian trolls also operated several Twitter accounts that presented themselves as local news outlets.

“It's another blow to local news ecosystems,” Lindgren said.

Vlad Shevtsov, director of investigations for Social Puncher, told BuzzFeed News that sites like the Albany Daily News masquerade as local outlets in order to appear credible enough to be accepted into digital advertising systems.

"When these sites were created and their owners applied to join advertising systems, a proper audit should have stopped their attempts to monetize this fictitious media,” he said. “But ad tech companies approved the request, and the sites began to receive money right away. Even when their revenue grew to the scale of a large publisher, no one even tried to study them in more detail."