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Meta made scam ads harder to find instead of removing them
- ChrisArchitect 10mo ago[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838
- zaphar 10mo agoThe original reuters article quotes Meta as claiming that making them harder to find by removing them from the system. This article doesn't offer any evidence to suggest that Meta is lying. This is lazy and poor reporting as far as I'm concerned.
- billyp-rva 10mo agoReuters: Restaurant hides unsanitary waste from food inspectors by hiding it in dumpster.
- fwipsy 10mo agoRestaurant seen throwing waste in dumpster after removing it from food inspector's plate. Insists there's no other waste on other plates, apparently without checking. What proportion of the scam ads do you think this approach caught?
- billyp-rva 10mo agoI'm not sure, but starting with the ads that appear with most popular searches isn't a bad idea per se. It's a bit like sending law enforcement to protect popular areas.
- gruez 10mo ago>Restaurant seen throwing waste in dumpster after removing it from food inspector's plate. Insists there's no other waste on other plates, apparently without checking. That seems... kinda reasonable? Health inspector: "hey it looks like your ice machine is dirty, and you're not keeping foods at a hot enough temperature" Restaurant: "ok we'll clean our ice machines more carefully and install thermometers to monitor the temperature of our hot trays" Journalist: "Restaurant made health violations harder to find instead of removing them!" Would it be better if the restaurant was proactively fixing issues before the health inspector brought it up? Yes. Does it make sense to imply that the restaurant was acting maliciously by making health violations "harder to find"? No.
- fwipsy 10mo agoRegulators can't verify every single Facebook ad. So, they take a sample. Facebook is creating a Potemkin village - trying to provide a clean sample. It suggests they don't believe that a wider sample would pass muster. It's more like if the health inspector found e coli in the spaghetti, so Facebook threw out the spaghetti then said "trust us, you don't need to check the macaroni, it's fine."
- josefx 10mo agoThat sounds funny, until you realize that there are people who pull ingredients from the waste bin if they still look "good enough". At least one restaurant chain owner in germany was banned from entering his own restaurants after he was caught on camera instructing his staff to do just that, apparently only one instance of a long chain of food safety violations his "frugal" business practices caused.
- LordShredda 10mo agoThe issue as I see it is that these searches are run when testers look for them, not on a regular basis. If Facebook can detect them, why let them be displayed in the first place?
- alsetmusic 10mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838
- barishnamazov 10mo agoThe original source is from Reuters article [0]. It is profoundly ironic that Meta is apparently using cloaking techniques against regulators. Cloaking is a black-hat technique where you show one version of a landing page to the ad review bot (e.g., a blog about health) and a different version to the actual user (e.g., a diet pill scam). Meta has spent years building AI to detect when affiliates cloak their links. Now, according to this report, Meta is essentially cloaking the ads themselves from journalists and regulators by likely filtering based on user profiling, IP ranges, or behavioral signals. They are using the sophisticated targeting tools intended for advertisers to target the "absence" of scrutiny. [0] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook-fend-off-pressure-crack-down-scammers-documents-show-2025-12-31/ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook...
- raverbashing 10mo agoSo there's Dieselgate for Meta as there is Dieselgate for Honey
- croes 10mo agoBoth are American companies, not like VW, so not much will happen
- wtcactus 10mo agoWhat does this have to do with them being American? You do realize nothing much happened to VW in Europe, I hope.
- epistasis 10mo agoVW executives went to prison: https://qz.com/dieselgate-sentences-handed-down-1851782440 https://qz.com/dieselgate-sentences-handed-down-1851782440 I do not yet know if there's wrongdoing here, but even if it was screaming bad, all US government enforcement bodies have been gutted and made completely subservient to the will of the president rather than their legislatively mandated mission, under a novel "unitary executive" philosophy. Further, that unitary executive is completely corrupt, and has already been paid off by Meta. Ukraine is a model of clean government with proper anti-corruption investigations and teeth compared to the US.
- commandersaki 10mo agoI posted in the other thread but in case that no longer has traction I will repeat my question here: I'm still wondering what the Scam Prevention Framework enacted in Australia will do to mitigate this kind of stuff. https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdb/au/legis/cth/consol_act/caca2010265/ https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdb/au/legis/cth/conso... (Part IVF)
- lax0 10mo agoNot to distract from Meta but I’m surprised Google doesn’t also get heat for this. A number of phishing sites win >30% of the auction on my company’s brand keywords and I see it on many others as well, especially in CPG and e-commerce. I’ve yet to have any luck getting Google to ban the advertisers.
- NooneAtAll3 10mo agoI remember getting "lend us your google account" ad ON YOUTUBE of all places
- nerdponx 10mo agoI think 80% of my Youtube ads are either outright scams or AI generated ads for questionable "as seen on TV" style products.
- johnnyfived 10mo agoIt's insane work when you just search "Coinbase" and literally the first or sponsored results are not Coinbase but scam sites. I've seen this first-hand in Google. Obviously SEO and DA isn't on their side so it has to just be like pay enough and you can push whatever you want.
- mcbutterbunz 10mo agoMy wife got hit by this. Click an ad for to a 100% fake site with deep discounts, put in her credit card, order never went through. I checked the advertiser and it was somewhere in China. A few days later, her CC was used to buy some gift cards online. At least it was a good learning experience.
- jqpabc123 10mo agoEasy solution: Don't patronize Meta.
- arealaccount 10mo agoNobody can figure this out for some reason
- akagusu 10mo agoMy first question in 2026. Why does such company is allowed to exist and harm society?
- timeon 10mo agoBecause it is based in US.
- Jgrubb 10mo agoBecause money.
- jfengel 10mo agoBecause companies have only existed for a few hundred years and we still haven't caught up with the idea of making things they do illegal. We tend to pass responsibility to the people who make up the company, rather than the corporation, but the people have gotten pretty good at making it impossible to assign blame to any individual. And you can't cost the owners (shareholders), because of course none of them are at fault, either. Who at Meta is responsible for posting scam ads? Nobody. But Meta isn't responsible, either. So some executive makes a halfhearted promise to do something about it, but without any accountability. The "limited liability" was just supposed to be for debts, but it turned out to be good for laundering responsibility, too. Originally, corporations had fixed term charters. And it might be worth looking at that again.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoWe need to start holding executives accountable for things going on in their companies, and go as far as holding board members, and if its an external company then hold them accountable as well, and their board members. Just go all the way on accountability to the point where it becomes hard to mess around because someone will freak out. I wonder how many "save my skin" whistleblowers we will see at the executive level if everyone at the top of a company can be held liable for stuff like this, that goes on for over a decade. Its pretty obvious Facebook KNOWS there's fraud, but they willfully do nothing, harming consumers everywhere. What you would see is firms divesting from companies that do this to save their own skins too, so funds would dry up if they don't remediate it.
- DivingForGold 10mo ago3 or 4 years ago I tried Google Adwords to see if I could gain new customers. I admit I had a niche business, it was already successful, but I had read prior about certain tech companies overcharging - - or not cancelling services after you requested, so I opted to use only pre-paid credit cards bought at my local drug store. I chose $200 limit per card. That lasted for about 1.5 to 2 years, several times Google emailed me that my card expired or ran out of $$, and I needed to correct the error. That's when I bought another pre-paid card for a limit of $200 and funded my acct again. I never noticed any uptick in customers contacting me from my websites. Eventually Google shut down the ability to use pre-paid credit cards (it came back an error when I attempted to enter the new card no) and that's when I closed my account. Their response was too obvious evidence <Goggle in conspiracy with the ad click bots> desired the ability to scam my account and one day I would check my email and get a $5,000 bill. There is a rather obvious "conflict of interest" when you have to dispute a charge with your credit card provider knowing that the credit card co is fully aware they only make their "cut" if the charge goes through.
- kyrra 10mo agoPrepaid credit cards tend to be a very common fraud vector (very similar to gift card scams). For chargebacks, the merchant has to pay at least a $15 fee on every chargeback, regardless of the outcome of the result. It's why many merchants prefer for you to contact them and ask for a refund rather than going through the chargeback process. For small purchases, merchants tend to just refund rather than dealing with an angry customer that's going to charge back.
- DivingForGold 10mo agoOn the other hand, prepaid credit cards seem to be one of the only ways to prevent merchants from "running up" the charges on a customers account. Sure, a customer can go through the dispute process but it's quite a hassle. Just "limiting the amount of money you place on the table" is quite effective. Giving a merchant your credit card with say a $5,000 or more available balance seems like insanity, like laying out 50 of $100 bills on the table: "here, go ahead, can I trust you to take only what you should" ? I would pay extra to have a VISA or MC credit card that only offers say a $200 limit, just for dubious situations, but again, providers have a "conflict of interest" in that they only make their "cut" when the charges go through, so the more and the larger the charges - - the more "cut" they obtain.
- pkphilip 10mo agoHow much more scammy and illegal behavior must we tolerate from Meta before anyone thinks of putting that Zuck behind bars?
- transcriptase 10mo agoI suspect there are either employees or contractors getting a cut because even getting a legitimate ad that doesn’t break any rules through review can be an exercise in frustration. I once spent days getting rejection after rejection for ads for a Christmas light show event at a vineyard (not winery, it was a dry event), on the grounds that I was apparently selling alcohol. Meanwhile I get ads for black market cigarettes, shrooms, roids, cannabis, and anything else you can imagine.
- asimeqi 10mo agoYes please I totally agree. Something big must be going on there. I once bought an item through an Instagram ad. For about a month I got fake updates about shipping. Then one day I get an email that itvwas delivered 2 days ago, complete with a different shipping path and an apparently real USPS tracking ID. Of course I received nothing. Complained to PayPal, the complaint was closed within minutes as not valid.
- D13Fd 10mo agoWhat compelled you to buy something through an ad? Does it often work? My operating assumption is that every click-through internet ad other than major brands (Apple, car makers, etc) is basically a scam.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoI've bought shirts I've seen through Facebook ads before. Ads can work, but Facebook is propped up with so many scams these days you have to wonder at what point do they get investigated over it? Amazon has had a similar problem, I've seen loads of threads here over it. I have been fortunate enough that most things I've bought off amazon have been legit.
- s1artibartfast 10mo agoYes, it often works. Ads are basically the only way for small business discovery.
- jackhuman 10mo agoI deleted my facebook. Its the only thing I can do it seems and I advice everyone to do the same. Screw this platform. Facebook’s scams have caused the elders in my family so much pain and me so much stress dealing with it, its not worth it. A monopolistic cancer on society.
- D13Fd 10mo agoI completely agree. I did this many years ago. The only thing that annoys me is that for many local things it’s the only option. I’m actually significantly less informed and involved in the local community because things are so heavily reliant on Facebook, and I refuse to sign back up.
- alex1138 10mo agoWhat's fun is how many things they lock behind a "fuck you, sign in to read this" popup (and now Instagram too) This from the same company that conveniently tends to reset privacy settings on posts (It ought to be possible to access info as a non-user, but you can't, so they force you to sign up)
- withinboredom 10mo agoThey globally reset the privacy settings for pretty entertaining reasons. Every few years a post goes around saying crazy privacy things that gives you instructions to change your privacy settings to only “share with yourself”. If you’re dumb enough to do it, you basically shadow-ban yourself. If enough people do it, they have to change the settings back because also those same people will complain about their aunt/neighbor/dad/sister whatever not being able to see their posts and have no idea why.
- alex1138 10mo agoI just honestly feel Zuck's lost the benefit of the doubt but I'm willing to be proven wrong
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- throwaway85825 10mo agoNo one will go to jail. The fee will cost less than they profited. Crime is defective legal, there's just a toll.
- TuringNYC 10mo agoNot sure why this only seems to happen with IG ads, but I've noticed twice already that i'll purchase something on IG for a fixed price, and it will automatically enroll me into a monthly subscription plan without any chance to cancel it. Further, the subscription can then not be cancelled without email interaction -- no web-based cancellation. The checkout screen had no mention of a subscription or any cost of a subscription, so not even sure how this is legal. It has not gotten to the point where I dont make any purchase via IG. I'll independently search for the product and purchase it (usually less expensively via Amazon.com). Not sure how this is good for IG, because the attribution is then not matched on the purchase. Further, not sure how this is even good for the merchant, since I'll inevitably have to do a chargeback.
- vgeek 10mo agoGavin Belson would never suggest scrubbing negative mentions of Hooli from the internet.
- neoCrimeLabs 10mo agoAdding to this frustration is a 25yr registered 501(c)3 non-profit I volunteer for that holds an annual art festival. The festival proceeds go to funding educational materials. They've had an active facebook page for at least 15 years, with thousands of followers from around the world. When the non-profit tried to advertise the art festival on Facebook. Facebook not only denied them, but when the non-profit asked for a review of the denial they were warned if they asked again their entire facebook page would be flagged and deleted. Facebook is large enough I cannot imagine their reasoning. They very likely have several conflicting streams of logic depending on teams involved. One thing I think is reasonable is that money is a motivational factor for Facebook. Put simply, organizations who come in immediately spending money on advertising are more likely to be fast tracked. Organizations who don't spent a lot of money are more likely to be shut down. ("you've been a freeloader all this time who will likely not pay sustainably after this one-time payment. We're focusing on sustainable paying customers, goodbye") Addition: Now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a literal metric of "money/time" ratio. The more money you spend in less time likely improves your chances of being fast-tracked, thus biasing new accounts who immediately spend on advertising over existing ones who sparsely pay.
- thunderfork 10mo agoHaving worked in advertiser support: fb pages are basically an unsupported product and their support channels for advertising are farmed out to the lowest bidder. They do bucket out support into spend tiers, although when I was there it was overall spend, not frequency
- neoCrimeLabs 10mo agoThanks for the insights! That was helpful.
- _DeadFred_ 10mo agoBro you may have just been socially engineered to give out the internal workings of Facebook from a neo crime lab.
- downrightmike 10mo agoThey made $16 BILLION last year off of them. Screw your parents and grandparents that get scammed out of their life savings, Meta has to make money.
- animanoir 10mo ago[dead]