Standard operating procedure

Methodology

An autopsy is a fixed procedure, not an opinion column. Every claim goes through the same four stations, in the same order, and ships with the terms of its own reversal.

How do we pick a claim?

We examine passive income claims in their generic, pattern-level form — the version that circulates in recruiting decks, course landing pages and social feeds. We do not target named living individuals. Named entities appear only where a public institution has already acted — an FTC case, a court record, an SEC filing — and we cite that docket directly.

Step 1 — Steelman the claim

The claim is stated at full strength before the examination starts, including the best arguments its defenders actually make. If a claim dies on our table, it dies healthy. A verdict against a strawman is worthless, and we would rather concede a claim's real appeals than pretend it has none.

Step 2 — Pull the primary evidence

Evidence means public datasets, regulator reports, court documents, exchange-level academic studies, and — where we operate in the examined niche ourselves — our own published profit-and-loss. Every figure is cited inline with a working URL and the month we accessed it. Where a number is our own arithmetic on someone else's published figures, we say so and show the division. Where the best available evidence is weak, we publish its weaknesses in a caveat table rather than laundering the number.

We maintain an internal do-not-cite list of sources that failed verification; nothing on that list appears in an autopsy, in either direction.

Step 3 — Publish the verdict, answer-first

Every autopsy opens with its verdict box: the claim as autopsied, the finding, and a stated confidence level. The confidence is graded against the evidence type — a population-level dataset earns "high"; a self-selected survey earns "moderate" with its caveats attached. Each autopsy also states what the evidence does not support: the limits of the verdict are part of the verdict.

Step 4 — State what would change the verdict

Every autopsy ends with a falsifiability note: the specific, checkable evidence that would force us to rewrite the page. If that evidence appears, the page is updated and the change is logged. A verdict that cannot name its own reversal terms is a mood, and we do not publish moods.

Who writes this, and with what tools?

Articles are published under the site byline, Passive Income Autopsy — an organization byline, not a fake persona. The legal operator is named in theimprint. AI tools assist in drafting and production under a human review gate; the full disclosure is in theeditorial policy. How the site earns (currently: it does not) is documented in how we make money.