Three digital marketing firms will pay a total of nearly $500,000 in fines to New York for falsifying public comments to support the Federal Communications Commission’s 2017 repeal of net neutrality rules.

Two of the marketing companies are based in California, with the third located in Colorado. These three entities, and others, generated nearly 9,000,000 fake comments to the FCC opposing net neutrality.

New York Attorney General Letitia James says the country’s largest broadband internet companies paid the marketing firms to file the bogus comments. Thousands of New Yorkers’ names were used without their knowledge, with some of the fake comments using the names of Empire State residents who were deceased.