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I gave up on trying to report abuse to Google, Amazon or Microsoft. It seems reports simply get ignored and the big providers do nothing. I hope the FSF with it
by jwr 6mo ago
I gave up on trying to report abuse to Google, Amazon or Microsoft. It seems reports simply get ignored and the big providers do nothing. I hope the FSF with its weight and media presence can finally do something.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are my major sources of spam. These days, this is where spam comes from.
At this point, they are also too big to block. We allowed this to happen, through neglect and laziness. Even in this discussion: how many people use Gmail as their primary email service?
- alpaca128 6mo agoOn YouTube I reported bot accounts for a couple days, the only reaction I got was that at some point it showed a popup that told me too many false reports would lead to a ban. Not sure what Google gets out of it, but there is no way they could be that bad at fighting bots unless they're not even trying. Even trivial tricks like copy-pasted texts keep working.
- luckylion 6mo agoBot comments and uploads count in KPIs. Blocking/Removing bots = KPIs look worse.
- LiamPowell 6mo agoThey're not trying. I've seen an advertiser remain active for months with literally tens of thousands of ads where clicking them directly downloads a malicious exe file that most antivirus scanners flag.
- nkrisc 6mo agoThey make money on those ads, you’re asking a mega corporation to make less money. Good luck.
- loopdoend 6mo agoTech support scams still?! I don't even understand how this is possible. If Google wanted to they could come up with the tech to bypass the spam/scammers own ghosting system. They must have some kind of invisible Google bot that checks for downloads/scams, right? Phone providers should also be detecting this with AI. There is no way this should be occurring anymore.
- canadapups 6mo agoThey're definitely not trying - in any form. I run a marketplace for dogs (i.e. craigslist for puppies & dogs) and scammers are always trying to post fakes ads. They always use Gmail accounts. Every time I ban a gmail address, they scammers will just get a new one. Same scammer/person has created thousands of gmail accounts and Google doesn't care. I have reported this to Google. For the amount of info Google has on people, trivial for them to prevent some of this.
- pixl97 6mo agoUntil a scammer uses some of your information then you get banned from Google with no way to appeal.
- eudamoniac 6mo agoShadowbans work much better for this purpose
- FireBeyond 6mo agoMeanwhile, because I've worked for several startups who have used Google Workspaces, if I (try to) open a new Google account, phone verification fails because my phone number "has been used too many times". Some places suggest "try logging into Google with your phone number, and deleting the account that's associated, if you don't need", that just ... doesn't work.
- tristor 6mo agoWorse, they're actively working to allow malicious activity. Meta made 10% of it's revenue, around $16B from known scams: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
- mcmcmc 6mo agoWhy would they? Their ad dollars spend the same, and they have no incentive to police it when they are protected by section 230. Edit: I’m not implying this is morally right or good for anyone but Google shareholders. This is just 21st Century American capitalism
- delfinom 6mo agoWe had that issue of someone advertising fake clones of our sites specifically to push fake malware ridden payloads. We only got it handled by bugging internal contacts at Google. It sucked and worse we had to bug them for weeks because the attacker was churning through multiple domains and probably over 100 breached Ad accounts by the time they stopped
- kdheiwns 6mo agoGoogle makes loads of money through scam ads and fake/AI slop videos. Anyone trying to get in the way of that is putting Google's profits at risk, hence why they shut down legitimate accounts but scammers just run free.
- nubinetwork 6mo ago> popup that told me too many false reports would lead to a ban That would imply that someone actually sees them... vs shoving them under the rug, or giving them to a bot to delete.
- noosphr 6mo agoNot me, but then most people are allergic to paying $10 a month. I figure an email is worth a beer.
- aendruk 6mo agoThat must be some good beer!
- saintfire 6mo agoMore likely at that price it's not good, it's just in a sports arena.
- tony_cannistra 6mo agoYou haven't been to <city>
- noosphr 6mo agoWorse than private email.
- MisterTea 6mo agoThis is called a monopoly. I know people who run their own mail servers to be as independent as possible. Ironically, they show up as spam in Gmail all the time because "This message is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past." Meanwhile, it's a fucking simple one paragraph message to a programming mailing list. They have to wrestle with DMARK or choose not to as they feel DMARK is playing into the hands of the monopolies giving them too much influence and power over something as simple and fundamental as email.
- mixologic 6mo agoDMARC isn't really that big of an issue to wrestle with, and I don't see how it gives anybody influence or power.
- mschuster91 6mo agoThe thing is, it's a mess to set up if you are not doing it correctly - which is all too easy if you are not doing this day-to-day. Spammers however, they have an economic incentive to have experts set up SPF, DMARC and all the other crap to appear legitimate.
- tombrandis 6mo agoI think that this is overstated, it takes ~15 minutes to set up SPF and DMARC correctly and few people run their own email servers. https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie/anti-spoofing-dkim-spf/ https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie/anti-spoofing-dkim-spf...
- dns_error 6mo ago[dead]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- mcmcmc 6mo ago