What It Is
AllegedFraud.com is a citizen journalism content network — 1,722 pages and counting — that aggregates investigative video reporting from independent creators and turns it into a searchable, taggable, geographically-organized archive.
Most YouTube reporting dies in the algorithm. A creator publishes a video about a local government scandal, and three weeks later it’s buried under sixteen new uploads. AllegedFraud takes those videos, builds a permanent indexed page for each one with full metadata, geographic tags, and topic taxonomy, and makes them findable forever.
The Numbers
- 1,722 pages across 8 creator channels
- 51 states mapped via tag taxonomy
- 8 verified creators — including FOX9 Minneapolis (194 videos), Forbes (200 videos pending), House Judiciary, Judicial Watch, and others
- AI-enriched summaries on every page (Anthropic Claude API)
- Built and maintained by one person with the support of an AI workflow
How It’s Built
Hugo static site, deployed to Netlify, sourced via the YouTube Data API and the BWS youtube-hugo-importer skill. Each creator gets a YAML config file. The import script pulls every video on their channel, generates a Hugo markdown page with frontmatter (title, date, description, tags, state, embed code), runs the description through Anthropic Claude for an enriched summary, and commits the result to the repo. Netlify builds and deploys automatically.
The tag taxonomy lives in data/tag_taxonomy.yaml and maps every U.S. state to 2-4 topic tags. When FOX9 fixed its geotagging, Minnesota jumped from 31 to 318 indexed pages overnight.
Why It Matters
Local investigative journalism is collapsing. Newspapers are gutted, TV stations are owned by hedge funds, and the stories that affect everyday Americans get drowned in feed noise. AllegedFraud is one operator’s answer: take the work that real reporters and citizen journalists are already doing, organize it, make it permanent, make it searchable, and let people find it without YouTube deciding what they’re allowed to see.
This is the same content infrastructure I build for clients — applied to a public good.