6 ms·

Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

• deleted 13d ago
  [deleted]
• qsbuilder 12d ago
  its so terrible because most of those ads pray on seniors, I swear i see the Tai Chi ad every single day and reported it so many times.
• soltanov 12d ago
  This appears less like a classification-capability problem than an incentives and enforcement problem. What measurable abuse-response SLA should an ad platform provide?
• andynrkri 13d ago
  My father saw a similar ad and got worried. The ad said you need to update your pdf version immediately. He uninstalled the YouTube because he knew it was irregular and thought his phone was hacked.
  • LollipopYakuza 13d ago
    If everyone was as cautious as your father, Google would have no choice but to improve the quality of their service.
    • itopaloglu83 13d ago
      Or they would start accepting money for remotely installing apps, just like the bloatware most phones and computers come with.
• CqtGLRGcukpy 13d ago
  I have two guesses why Google does this: 1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru. 2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it. As to why Google doesn't use AI to review them? Google would rather use the AI in a way that makes them more money, than review ads and if AI decides to take them down then that's less money for Google. (To be clear: I don't work for Google in any way, these are just my guesses)
  • r_lee 13d ago
    using AI to review ads costs basically nothing for Google I would say it's just because there's no incentive to do anything unless a huge media storm breaks out or something. turning a blind eye to this stuff probably makes them good money
    • IsTom 13d ago
      If they reject more ads they get less money.
      • deleted 13d ago
        [deleted]
  • stogot 13d ago
    Someone should ask them: if Gemini can’t evaluate this at scale then why should I use it for my enterprise?
    • itopaloglu83 13d ago
      Since they're not liable for damages, they simply don't care enough to check the ads.
    • kiicia 13d ago
      because that makes them even more money for equally nonexistent amount of liability, this is actual answer, unfortunately
  • benoau 13d ago
    I think section 230 immunity shielding from from any liability is also very motivating. Google was born into a world where companies had 10,000s of support personnel, today there are companies with over a million employees, they could easily human-review every single ad and they probably would if they weren't able to divert that cost into profits without consequence. AI makes it even easier and cheaper but... why bother? Then there's the profits from scams, Meta is the only one with the stones to admit they like scam ads because they make up 10% of their revenue. I doubt it's a massive coincidence all the other big platforms are overrun with scams they do as little as possible to police.
• corranh 13d ago
  This one is not complicated…Because dodgy companies spend a lot of money on ads.
  • zbentley 13d ago
    Yep. And I suspect (would love some real data from scammy advertisers) that this is a bigger factor than most folks appreciate. If you're a regular business that sells clothes or food or SaaS or insurance or whatever, online ads are a) not your whole customer acquisition system (you have regular marketing, word of mouth, maybe sales people, maybe brick-and-mortar brand presence, physical advertising, etc.) and b) not part of your expense sheet that you want to spend tons of time on. The "b)" there leads companies to either overspend on stupid (but unlikely to be flagged) ads, or to try to keep their ad spend as low as possible for the highest reward, because they think of it like opex. After all, they have all the normal expenses of a normal business to worry about in addition to ad spend. Sure, there are outliers here who spend almost all their non-product money on online ads, but not most ordinary companies from Verizon to Dave's Local Auto Insurance to Safeway. So "good"/ordinary advertisers aren't generating super high flag rates, but they're probably either a) spending lots of money without churn/support-needs risk or b) aren't spending that much ... compared to scam-ads-only businesses. Sure, google would prefer more upstanding customers in category "a)", but they're a near-monopoly and some of that growth is expensive to chase, while the scammers are beating a path to their door. If you're a scam-ad business that produces malware or LLM-written gacha games or whatever, your product expenses are minimal and, if your business is lucrative, you can spend very large amounts of your balance sheet on ads for scam delivery channels. Tiny businesses in this area are likely to have whale-sized ad spends and a strong likelihood of growth (vertical as they get bigger/greedier, or horizontal as they keep spinning up new businesses to keep ahead of the law and bad press). I bet they punch above their weight ad-spend-wise, in other words. You thought the unit economics of a SaaS business were good? Well, wait until you see the unit economics of a Play Store whitelabeled gacha game app with a credential stealer inside!
  • noir_lord 13d ago
    More specifically a very large number of dodgy companies spend a relatively small amount each but in aggregate it's a lot of money. Google has no interest in policing that because money and won't until they are forced to and since they are a transnational that's difficult since it requires multiple countries to do it with the added wrinkle that if you even hint at the possibility that just maybe you might consider doing something about US big tech you get immediate screaming from across the Atlantic.
• anonym29 13d ago
  I suspect this boils down to a cost/benefit tradeoff. The cost of strictly enforcing stated rules for ads is felt immediately and fully by Google. It is concrete, measurable, and probably non-insignificant; the benefit is essentially goodwill from the narrow sliver of the web that is verbal about this. That is intangible, difficult to measure, even harder to assign a reasonable dollar value to (meaning the ROI could look negative), and the benefit would accrue to parties other than Google who might not even notice.
• qwerty_clicks 13d ago
  Keep up these efforts to name and shame. If Google won’t act on these things because it doesn’t make them money, because they are unregulated, or because they are lazy, they might because it still cuts their credibility and reputation. Especially here on HN where Google is no longer considered such a darling by developers and thinkers.
• torginus 13d ago
  Do platform holders have a say in this? I'm sure if I submitted an app that on the iOS app store that mimicked a system warning that tried to scare people into giving me access, it would not pass the review process. If instead I decided to embed a WebView and later changed the html to do the same I would likely get booted from the app store (afair Apple's very particular about serving remote content in PWAs, and changing said content, even under benign circumstances). iOS seems to have less scareware and shady apps than Android anyways.
  • tough 13d ago
    the app store is filled with scammy apps, its just a different flavour I once got a crypto-wallet PK leaked by a fake wallet app impersonating another very known brand. Found out on reddit it was a fake... After a few months the real app came out but yeah...
• sippingabonedry 13d ago
  Because serving dodgy ads pays them a lot of money. The pivot is complete. 90% of the ads I see on YouTube are obvious scams. Many from untraceable shady overseas organizations. You can see the data if you report them. It's always some unheard of outfit out of Hong Kong or Brazil. I want to know who is funding this. You don't need to be Kreskin to figure this one out.
  • vintermann 13d ago
    > You can see the data if you report them. That's at least something. Last I was on a streaming service, they were very fastidious about not revealing who was behind a spammer's rotating "music labels", despite them by law having some kind of payment details for them.
  • inknight 13d ago
    > I want to know who is funding this It's a network made by snake-oil salesman. People on Brazil yearns for passive-income, and they get told by a lot of influencers that dropshipping is what will give them their freedom. Then you have thousands of people dumping fake ads about borderline fake products on Meta and Google. It's actually a hive-mind.
  • lionkor 12d ago
    Who's funding this? The people getting scammed, usually.
  • mrweasel 12d ago
    I've mentioned this hundreds of time in various context and forums: I do not believe that there's sufficient quality ad content to keep companies like Google or Meta running at their current levels. It doesn't make sense to me that the stores and manufactures selling physical goods are able to fund the entire tech industry. They simply have to allow a certain number of sketchy ads, perhaps not outright scams, but they need to pimp some level of questionable products and services to keep the money printer running. Geography certainly plays a roll, the smaller the market, the less advertisers are available. When I occasionally wanders into the ad supported internet without a tracker-blocker I get the same ads on repeat. It's my local supermarket, where I shop regardless, it's ads for vitamins and assistive devices for the elderly and plastic junk from China. That's it... honestly I can't see how that funds the tech gigants.
• ArcHound 13d ago
  Man, Google is catching strays from all directions. I recently posted an article about their bot behaviour [0], only to be drowned in other more pressing issues. To comment on this one: as long as there is no backlash from their real customers (those that buy ads) nothing will change. [0] https://blog.miloslavhomer.cz/how-google-sees-your-site/ https://blog.miloslavhomer.cz/how-google-sees-your-site/
  • BLKNSLVR 13d ago
    This one isn't a stray. This is multiple sources actively and accurately directing their shots.
• expedition32 13d ago
  Not just dodgy some are straight up illegal. They'll act if someone threatens to sue otherwise Google doesn't give a shit as long as they get paid.
• poisonborz 13d ago
  Meta knowingly earns 10% of its _overall_ sales from scams. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10percent-of-2024-sales-came-from-scam-fraud-ads.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10...
  • Scoundreller 13d ago
    It's more than that. The 10% is the scam ads that "won" the ad auctions. It doesn't include the effect of scam ads bidding up the market and increasing the price of non-scam ad wins. (Could also argue that the scam ad that won the slot for 10 cents would have gone for 9 cents without the scam and Meta's marginal revenue was only 1 cent... but if every ad is 1 cent more...) Same problem when you want to buy a home in a place where real estate became a means for money laundering or uninhabited store of value
    • vintermann 13d ago
      > Could also argue that the scam ad that won the slot for 10 cents would have gone for 9 cents without the scam and Meta's marginal revenue was only 1 cent. They're probably taking that into account in their 10% of profit coming from ads estimate.
• 976157424477 13d ago
  [dead]
• rectang 13d ago
  Ohhh, has anybody used AI to generate delicious statistics about how many ads served by various ad networks will get you hacked / violate the ad networks own policies?
• tomxor 13d ago
  > I’m a big fan of Hanlon’s razor. There is a 3rd option: malicious stupidity / aka wilful ignorance. Google is a collection of individuals, so it's very likely both sides of Hanlon's razor are true: a little malice from those in control, persisting a state of stupidity for those executing the process. As others have pointed out, there will be resistance to improving a process that negatively impacts their bottom line. Incentives, dictate long term behaviour of organisations; whereas Hanlon's razor works better at an individual level IME.
• surcap526 13d ago
  [dead]
• conradfr 13d ago
  I have a website with some adsense ads (that pay for the server). I try blocking the most obvious scams by blocking the announcers but it's basically impossible because the same dodgy ones keep coming back with a new name. Also hard because they're not always in a language you understand. I don't think I should do all this work instead of the biggest ad company in the world just to earn 5€ per day, but I'm also not aware of any better alternative.
  • dpkirchner 13d ago
    Have you tried reaching out to companies offering relevant products? Sometimes they have referral plans and don't require the same level of tracking.
• dotcoma 13d ago
  Because they are a dodgy company?
• snailmailman 13d ago
  Google can reply and confirm whether or not a report did anything? I’ve never seen that. I report ads on YouTube all the time. I’ve reported ads for illegal drugs, illegal firearms, pornography, and all sorts of various scams. I’ve seen similar advertising to the example in this article, mimicking the phone’s UI. Ive reported them. I’ve never once seen Google reply to any of my reports to confirm what happened. I’ve always wondered, and since I continue to see the ads I just assume my reports go straight into a trash bin. The illegal firearm ad I saw (more than a year ago, now) I was so shocked that I took screenshots and reported it multiple times. The ad advertised that the weapon was “easy to sneak through security” and “didn’t require an id to purchase” I saw the ad several times across multiple weeks. I reported it every time. I don’t think Google ever did anything about it. If they did, it took them weeks
  • repeekad 13d ago
    There is am extremely pervasive trick where bots repost trending comments rewritten in AI very early in videos and boost their bot comments above the original, then if a bot lands a top comment the profile is suddenly switched to porn/scam links with a female model as the profile picture. It's so common and so clearly reported by many people that I'm left to assume Google likes the engagement the profiles bring and chooses to leave them up.
  • vintermann 13d ago
    I can recall one time I got feedback from Google that an ad had indeed been taken down, that was an Ukrainian women dating ad in Gmail which was not subtle at all about offering trafficked women. But that's some time ago.
  • stevage 13d ago
    Why do you keep reporting them, when clearly that does nothing? And since, as this article points out, Google does not need reports if they actually wanted to block such ads, it seems completely pointless.
    • nubinetwork 12d ago
• 8cvor6j844qw_d6 13d ago
  I've seen suspiciously more malicious ads on older users phone (e.g., click to update Chrome ads) especially in-app ads.
  • hsuduebc2 13d ago
    You can target by specific system or even a version. This is simply google tolerated malicious behavior because it brings them revenue.
• HarHarVeryFunny 13d ago
  Google's ad-serving is dumb as a rock. It seems to be based just on things it thinks you may be interested in, even when it should be 100% obvious that they are not things you are going to buy. They should let people have more control over what ads they do and don't see. If Google served me ads on stuff I was interested in (I'd be happy to tell them) rather than women's clothing, they I might buy it. I'm a guy - show me as many skimpily dressed women as you like, but I have no need for women's clothes! Try it once or a hundred times it you must, but maybe after the millionth non-purchase you'd think they might figure it out and use that screen real-estate to serve an ad for something that my purchase history or what they know about me indicates I might have some interest in! Dumb as a rock.
  • pbhjpbhj 13d ago
    They've got ads to shift, they need eyeballs, they don't really care about conversion beyond if it hits the bottom line. It's like the whole purpose of ads, they're not trying to sell you stuff you need - they want your money.
    • HarHarVeryFunny 13d ago
      Well, the advertizers want my money, which they are not getting - wrong ads. Google wants the advertizers' money, who are really being scammed by Google if they pay every time Google serves an ad to me that Google presumably knows is not going to result in a purchase. I guess Google don't care - if they get paid for click-thrus and I occasionally do that, but never buy, then Google still gets their money.
• drchaim 13d ago
  I’d love to know how much Google has made from accidental clicks since it started. I used to see my mum make a couple of mistaken clicks here and there on her computer; now on mobile it’s easily 10x worse. Sometimes because she doesn’t realize they’re ads, other times she tries to tap the X and it opens… It’s insane
• dpkirchner 13d ago
  I think the obvious answer is they aren't held to account by regulators. If a few execs were sent to prison for defrauding their users (and investors for taking on so much risk) things would change overnight.
• alpineman 13d ago
  Same for Facebook posts and comments inciting hatred
• beloch 13d ago
  This is one major reason why blocking ads is now a safety issue. If you have a family member who, for whatever reason, might be fooled by this sort of ad, install an effective adblocker on all their browsers and uninstall/disable browsers that don't support an effective adblocker. If you are reliant on ad revenue, you should be expressing your displeasure to google right now.
  • snailmailman 13d ago
    When Google broke the original uBlock origin and made people switch to uBlock Lite, I found out about the change because my grandmother called me in a panic. She saw an ad like the one in this article on her Facebook page and clicked it, then it was telling her to call Microsoft support because her computer was infected. Like, Google removing Adblock directly caused that. Facebook allowing the ad caused that. The ad led to malicious page that was also hosted on a Microsoft thing, and I ended up reporting it to them too. Microsoft at least promptly took it down within a half hour after I reported it. But these big companies have almost no incentive to stop this, and some of them directly profit off of these scams happening.
    • worik 13d ago
      > When Google broke the original uBlock origin and made people switch to uBlock Lite Not me. Is that because I stuck with Firefox?
      • Telaneo 13d ago
        Yes. > What Happened with Manifest V3 > Updated: January 2026 > In late 2024, Google completed its transition to Manifest V3 in Chrome, which fundamentally changed how browser extensions work. As a result, the full version of uBlock Origin is no longer available for Chrome users. Here's what happened and what your options are now. https://ublockorigin.com/ https://ublockorigin.com/
      • nvme0n1p1 13d ago
        [dead]
• gdulli 13d ago
  A lot of questions being raised today can be answered by the recently inverted power balance between users/customers and corporations. People have not yet internalized that old assumptions about how corporations fear losing customers are no longer valid. Consumers have become entirely docile and passive. Open hostility to consumers is now a norm. (Obviously regulation is also less powerful and less feared as well.)
  • smugglerFlynn 13d ago
    Many large modern corporations are third-hand cars. The original owner had a purpose and an emotional investment in owning the car; for the second-hand owner, it became a practical thing; for the third-hand owner, it is often a liability. If you are lucky, your third-hand owner still checks the oil and puts quality tires on it. If you are not, your third-hand owner pours customer relationships down the drain and doubles down on indiscriminate cost-cutting, alienating good people from the organization.
  • chneu 13d ago
    This is ultimately on the consumer. Critical thinking is long gone for like half the general population. It's wild. The excuses are endless.
    • gdulli 12d ago
      You're right. It's in their power to kneecap the businesses they sit on Twitter and whine about. Twitter, incidentally, being another one of those businesses.
• mito88 13d ago
  a rhetorical question... :)
• hn_submit 13d ago
  These days almost all Google search results return nothing but links to stuff that you can buy instead of useful information you were looking for. They do this because they think they can get away with it, they're the only game in town. To me this signals a huge opportunity for other companies to dive into. If a new internet search company appeared that returned actual useful search results and clearly delineated ads (like Google used to) I would switch to it almost immediately. The only way these companies are ever going to change their game is when people vote with their feet!
  • cmoski 13d ago
    Kagi is better. You might want to try it.
    • bbor 13d ago
      Kagi is such an amazing team, building a truly next-level product. It's hard to realize what you're missing until you experience a real search engine for the first time in decades. It's wonderful.
    • hn_submit 13d ago
      Kagi will never make it. Asking people money for search is a non-starter. Also, I type in something in the search bar and...nothing happens. There's a pop-up below the search bar which tells me nothing is saved with a "Dismiss" button. When I press it I'm being directed to the homepage telling me to pay-up.
• hsuduebc2 13d ago
  It simply increases shareholder value more than if they we're removed. It will only ends when companies will be made at least partially responsible for damages they help to facilitate. Don't be evil my ass.
• hnbad 13d ago
  Google (Alphabet) is a corporation. Corporations follow the profit motive. Furthermore it's a publicly traded corporation. These follow the interests of their shareholders. What does killing dodgy ads do for Google's bottom line? It's removing paying customers and driving down competition for (and therefore value of) ad space. What's the cost of dodgy ads to Google? The sites that use Google Ads will continue using Google Ads if they do nothing about the dodgy ads. The sites that don't use Google Ads won't be swayed to use Google Ads if they do remove the dodgy ads. Google is not held liable for serving dodgy ads so there's no direct risk associated with serving them. Why should Google remove the dodgy ads? "Don't be evil"? That motto exceeded its shelf life before it was first publicly posted. Hanlon's razor is nice and all but there's a difference between malice and amoral apathy. Corporations would sell shredded orphans as fuel if it made economical sense to do so.
• einpoklum 13d ago
  > Why is Google still serving dodgy ads? Because you're using an application which presents those ads to you. Avoid Google/Alphabet application as much as is possible, and you'll see a lot less / none of this kind of ads. It looks like you're using their YouTube client. Try NewPipe: https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/ there are no ads with NewPipe.
• stillpointlab 13d ago
  I don't think it is fair to pin this on Google - I get the worst ads on X. But something about how the X ad network works means that even when I report the ad, block the ad poster, etc. there is this army of alternate ad accounts that all show the same ad. I was feeling very guilty last night as I was watching YouTube and getting 30s+ unskippable ad blocks every 10 minutes in some video. And the repetition and low quality were grating on me. I thought: being rich is never having to watch another ad. Why am I letting these ads own spaced repetition slots in my brain that could be filled with knowledge? Instead of learning, my mental energy is being taken up by psychological manipulation to purchase? The relentless repetition of the mind-numbing ad interspersed throughout otherwise educational content. Being rich is owning the real-estate of my own mind. I sometimes feel like a digital serf in my own head.
  • hsuduebc2 13d ago
    Somehow I would never assume that X would act "moral". Google on the other hands even few years back was generally acknowledged as a good actor which was once again corporate charade people would fall for. Including myself.
  • akersten 13d ago
    Why are you subjecting yourself to that instead of downloading Firefox + uBlock origin? See the headline of this article for Exhibit (I've actually run out of letters in the alphabet) why adblocking is a moral imperative.
    • stillpointlab 13d ago
      As much I love a good old "Why don't you just ..." response that terrifically misses the point - in this particular case I was watching YouTube through their Apple TV app. Now, there may be another "why don't you just ..." or "well, actually ..." response you have queued up, maybe some ramblings about a pi hole, or some anti-Apple hate, or some other solutioneering. Go ahead, tell me. But it is the structure of incentive that forces this. The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid. And Google offers an option: Youtube Premium. That give both me and the creator what we want and (for the time being) removes the ads. So either one is rich in time (doing whatever "why don't you just ..." hoop you expect me to jump through) or rich in money.
• ossamameta1 13d ago
  [flagged]
• mschuster91 13d ago
  Google doesn't care because they figured out no one will hold them accountable any more. The US regulatory authorities DGAF ever since Lina Khan exited the picture and the EU regulatory authorities might have the legal basis to hold Big AdTech accountable, but the EU is at the moment busy trying to fend off BS from the Trump admin, they do not have time and risk appetite (aka Trump retaliating on behalf of Big AdTech) left for scam ads.
  • BLKNSLVR 13d ago
    I look forward to any country putting forward very heavy advertising regulation as a proxy for the tax avoidance schemes they all use.
    • mschuster91 12d ago
      Won't happen. Trump is already busy threatening us for DSA - if we open up the can of worms that is tax evasion by global megacorps, it might not just invite further childish tariff wars, it might threaten our own global megacorps (especially our car, pharmaceutical and chemical industries, as well as banks and insurances) as well because they also want to save taxes wherever they can.
• Waterluvian 13d ago
  I don’t think they want to nor is it good for them to long term. But I bet they’re institutionally incapable of avoiding it given the KPIs that drive the entire employment ambitions of many managers.
• krttherealest 13d ago
  yall better ba carefull with that ads and shi
• pschastain 13d ago
  Money
• demibabs 13d ago
  > TLDR: AI is really good at detecting deceptive adverts - why isn’t Google using it? I have the same question regarding “why is Workday’s resume parser so shit?”
• michael_j_x 13d ago
  imagine if a TV network served scammy ads during prime-time TV.
  • operatingthetan 13d ago
    Don't they? Kalshi, crypto stuff, sports betting, random products that lie about what they do.
  • nephihaha 13d ago
    The TV here used to advertise payday loans. Some of had them four figure interest on them. There are street loansharks who charge less.
• paulsutter 13d ago
  The answer is in Google's Capex trends: 2023: $32B 2025: $91B 2027: $300B (projected) 2029: $400B (projected) “I’m happy to go bankrupt rather than lose this race” -Larry Page
• saaaaaam 13d ago
  How weird. I reported this exact ad earlier today.
• Razengan 13d ago
  Has anyone ever actually even purchased anything just because of an ad? In fact, these days ads have the opposite effect: A repetitive ad turns people off from EVER checking out that product. F Grammarly and ClickUp etc. I've never tried those products but I have disgust for them thanks to their ads.
  • cmoski 13d ago
    One would assume so. How do you think Google, Meta, etc make all their money?
• jacobgold 13d ago
  Someone who has spent $100M+ on Google Ads explained to me that Google is doing everything possible to juice their revenue right now, in ways they've never seen before. Seems like two things 1) Google is losing at AI and Sundar wants to mask this 2) AI is going to destroy their ad business and they want to get while the getting is good.
  • conception 13d ago
    I think the 3.8 Flash release shows they are doing just fine at AI. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropomorphic, Google doesn’t have to release new models to capture VC sentiment every three months. They have the hardware, data and money. And when they release a model it’s very good. Now their product strategy however…
    • alfalfasprout 13d ago
      very HN take. Reality is 3.8 flash is good at what it does (being fast + cheap)... but that market is becoming very saturated and google is not competing at all at the frontier where major spend lies.
      • Citizen_Lame 13d ago
        So just ignore the reality, that Gemini (and yes even 3.8 Flash) is worst of all major LLMs across most metrics? But that's fine, because reasons?
        • econ 13d ago
          Today search results are a page full of ads. They can't get away with that unless they completely corner down the LLM market. I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called. If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.
• flerchin 13d ago
  They don't have liability for dodgy ads, but they are paid to run them. POSIWID.
• boredatoms 13d ago
  Google gave up, they know they’ve lost Search to ChatGPT
• vannevar 13d ago
  I assume it is the same reason Facebook serves dodgy ads: it makes them money and they have had no liability for the material they choose to serve to users. There are a handful of types of content that could generate bad press (some sexual or racist content, for example), so they police those. But ordinary scams generate engagement and make them money, and since they are generally immune from liability for content under Section 230, there's no downside for them. I've always thought there might be an end-run around Section 230 where the algorithm is tuned to preferentially present fraudulent content, thereby implicating the company in the advertiser's fraud. But as far as I know, no one has tested that approach.
• rhaff 13d ago
  My father installed an adware through one of the google ads. Just straight out of nowhere displays fullscreen ads whatever you're doing.
• DarmokTanagra 13d ago
  [dead]
• codingjoe 13d ago
  Same with Meta. The latter knowingly makes a substantial revenue from those ads. Unless a government steps it to make advertising platforms liable, there will be zero incentive for change
• gherkinnn 13d ago
  > However, if you were being uncharitable, you do have to question whether it’s in Google’s interest to remove adverts that get lots of clicks. That is it. They don't do it because it goes against their interests. Google is a scummy company doing scummy things. There is very little else to it.
• driverdan 13d ago
  Until they are held legally liable they will do the minimum necessary to keep the money flowing and avoid litigation.
• Telaneo 13d ago
  We need strict liability on this front. Google is complicit. No newspaper or equivalent publication in the days before web ads would allow ads that are down at the level of scam that seemingly make up the modus operandi of Google today (and even the ads back then that did bend the truth a bit, overpromised, or showed products that didn't actually have any legitimate use, shouldn't really have been legal back then either. They just weren't big enough of a problem to worry about).
  • mikestew 13d ago
    The water-injection system for your carburetor that the oil companies don't want you to know about! -- paraphrase of an actual Popular Mechanics ad circa 1978
    • fho 13d ago
      Joke's (partly) on you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_injection_(engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_injection_(engine)
      • mikestew 13d ago
        Oh, it's been proven to work, even in a limited number of production vehicles. Just not with what you buy out of the back of a magazine. :-)
    • Scoundreller 12d ago
      I later in life learned that the “test cards - all channels” ads I saw in the back of the library’s Popular Science in the 90s probably weren’t scams.
  • patrakov 13d ago
    We need strict liability on this front. Companies behind websites that embed ads that they didn't verify (and don't control) are complicit.
    • 13d ago
• riazrizvi 13d ago
  Because money? Ask me another.
• gagan2020 13d ago
  To Google, Don't be Evil
• tcfhgj 13d ago
  Still some people don't block ads and people pay for it. Simple as that.
• HomeDeLaPot 13d ago
  Every YouTube ad I see now is an AI-generated scam ad hawking everything from free electricity to anti-aging products to birdhouses hand-carved by an AI-generated senior citizen. I've seen some multiple times, days or weeks apart. Their advertising standards are a complete joke.
  • johng 13d ago
    This senior citizen doing stuff got me. I bought a pair of cow slippers because I thought he was making them from his farm in Australia. Turns out they use that same "character" to hawk multiple products.
    • mbirth 13d ago
      YouTuber Pleasant Green has several videos about all those fake ads making rounds. The one about fake old people is this one: https://youtube.com/watch?v=f9MbhNJ5EIU https://youtube.com/watch?v=f9MbhNJ5EIU
    • nkrisc 13d ago
      Unfortunately at this point I assume that everything I see online is fake until I have a good reason to think otherwise.
    • Gigachad 13d ago
      Every risk the early AI researchers warned us about came true, the companies released it anyway and here we are.
  • icoder 13d ago
    I've flagged an AI-generated add once that promoted a small device that could cool a hot room (many degrees celcius lower, very quickly, for very little energy and very little money and without external components), defying the laws of thermodynamics. They said they investigated it and concluded it did not break any rules and no actions where taken.
    • sundvor 12d ago
• erros 13d ago
  Money. They make so much money from malvertisement that it doesn't make sense to remediate them. It's corporate greed and they've known about this since the 2010s, various campaigns have sprung up and have caused untold X amount of dollars in damages in breaches, and nothing changes. I've heard at least one FBI agent who had investigated cases related to malvertisement put Google up there with some of the worst ad networks.
  • ocdtrekkie 13d ago
    This is it. The truth is Google's largest revenue sources are scams, fraud, and malware, and they wouldn't be in business without them. They're not going to remove all of their highest pay per click customers because it might harm society or something. Just try to convince Google to remove "MapsQuest Driving Directions", a browser hijacking extension advertiser who clearly impersonates one of Google's competitors: It's an extremely high value scam targeting seniors (the folks who mostly look for MapQuest on... Google) and it makes them way too much money for them to stop it.
    • erros 12d ago
      So true!
• Jskewel 13d ago
  Adsense has been a nightmare for us. They have been putting thousands of scam adverts on our website for some time. Think "you have been looking at xxx and must pay a $100 fine" type popup nonsense. Hosted on the following websites: azurestaticapps.net azurewebsites.net herokuapp.com ondigitalocean.app digitaloceanspaces.com netlify.app Google doesn't allow you to block these domains, because they consider them "TLDs" (the scammers use a new subdomain every day eg abcdefg.herokuapp.com). The scammers get banned and return the next day with a new account and subdomain (repeat every day). Therefore we cannot stop them. It's bizarre and baffling. But Google Adsense had to go.
  • deleted 13d ago
    [deleted]
  • guelo 13d ago
    The problem is the scummy adsense ads don't hurt Google's reputation. Outside the techie crowd people don't know the ads are from Google.
    • hansvm 13d ago
      That seems fixable. When people include this JS garbage, have a header/title/etc stating that this is Google's professional opinion. Bake it into a library offering enough other features that a large number of people are inclined to use it.
      • sysguest 13d ago
        hmm could you explain more?
        • hansvm 13d ago
          - The big problem is that malicious ads are being displayed without appropriate attribution - Add that attribution -- blame Google (or, supposing the ads are good, credit Google; a good header goes a long way toward swaying people's opinions) - But it doesn't matter if a single website appropriately attributes Google's highest/lowest-quality ads. The last step (speculative and hand-wavy) is to incorporate that behaviour in some sort of software more people want to use. If you're fighting alone then you'll lose. If you can convince more people that appropriately crediting Google's advertising successes and blaming their malicious failures is advantageous, you'll (by definition) have more traction in the anti-megacorp-endorsed scams and other life-altering consequences.
• muyuu 13d ago
  They have always been spivs. Their entire business model is dishonest and predatory.
• tonyhart7 13d ago
  "Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?" more like why company still want to receive money ????? is more correct term
• kazinator 13d ago
  Extension to Hanlon's: never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to apathy and greed.
  • pampas 12d ago
    This. When it's a person the original quote applies. But big companies have millions of data points on everything and are competent in areas they care about like their own profit. So you can assume it's not ignorance. They don't care if a publisher has to spend loads of time resolving issues rogue ads and malvertising because it doesn't affect them and the end user just blames the publisher.
• Pxtl 13d ago
  Why not? It's not like they face any consequences for being party to fraud. Laws are for poor people.
• colordrops 13d ago
  Because google is dodgy.
• celestialcheese 13d ago
  We had to hire a full time person to monitor and block click-trick "Continue" / "Download" scam ads on Google Ad Manager. With the amount of human training we did blocking these ads, google could absolutely solve this problem instantly. The ad creatives are nearly identical. We were seeing new ad accounts targeting our specific domain daily (ad account names like {sitename}339, {sitename}340, etc) When we asked our reps, they dance around the question by saying they would "escalate to engineering" or some bs like that. Google just makes far too much money to stop. My guess is that its >40% of AdX display revenue, based on the % of scam ads that come through ad manager. Context: our site did ~$5m AdX revenue annually, mostly US audience. High CPM niche. This was ~7 years ago till 2 years ago when we sold the business, I would guess it's still happening based on ads I see browsing the internet.
• mike_bob 13d ago
  No surprise under a republican controlled government, the FCC considers this type of behavior "good for business".
  • prettyblocks 13d ago
    strange assertion as this has been an ongoing problem from day one.
• kylepomykala 13d ago
  "Don't be evil."
• NKosmatos 13d ago
  LOL because they're greedy and they want the maximum profits for their shareholders and the board. The same explanation applies to every big (greedy) corporation :-( Have you seen what is happeing with Facebook marketplace? with Twitter ads? (no, it's not called X, it's still Twitter for some of us) have you seen apps on Play store and Apple? All soulless, big, greedy companies do this and they don't care about us anymore :-(
• nullc 13d ago
  Youtube's bitcoin doubler scams are a great example of this... they run essentially the same videos over and over again, usually Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, or Steve Wozniak, occasionally Warren Buffet and a few others-- with some ticker or scroll telling people about a special promotion where whatever bitcoin you send them will be sent back doubled. It takes basically nothing to reliably identify these videos. They're extremely heavily promoted with ads running on other videos. Google does nothing with them when reported. Google does not proactively remove them. And because, contrary to the documentation, youtube doesn't pull the verified flag from a channel when its name is changed, these scams go out on channels that look like official sources for the celebrities in them (they steal some random verified channel then change its name to SpaceX (official) or Microstrategy or whatever). Google even got sued unsuccessfully by Woz and some of the scam victims-- and their response was pound the "S230 is an absolute shield for externally provided material" table and continue to do nothing about the fraud except rake in money from pedaling it. They haven't even fixed the verified flag issue. (Shades of the same conduct were seen in the old viacom v. youtube case, -- users were reporting copyright infringements so they took away the button.) I have sympathy for the S230 shield and consider it very important-- but the law is the absolute worst we're allowed to be. They are free to do better (and the CDA shield was designed to assure they can moderate without picking up liability). Google's conduct is irresponsible, unethical, and may well cost us this important legal protection because if society's choice is liability for hosts OR the biggest and wealthiest companies do nothing while raking in money from even the most flagrant scams we're going to eventually choose liability with dire consequences for free speech. It's especially ironic that the smaller sites and forums (like HN) would be hit especially hard by a narrowing of S230, but these forms reliably work hard to remove the worse abuse-- and are seldom the source of anything that truly offends the senses at least not for long. Companies like google that don't are ones that are so wealthy and powerful that they're almost intractable to litigate against even without S230 like protection. Loss of it would hurt them gravely but it would hurt everyone smaller more.
• wwind123 13d ago
  My understanding is, it's a multi-party cat-and-mouse game that never stops evolving. The publishers (websites or apps owners) that provide free content to users need a way to support the free content, and typically it's either donation (like wikimedia) or ads. To most publishers, ads revenue is far more predictable. By right most publishers also would like the ads to be reliable and relevant to the users consuming their content, but that's usually a secondary concern, compared to the revenue. The users viewing the content are often annoyed by the ads, but as long as the ads are not too intrusive, they usually tolerate the ads. If the users occasionally find ads are actually useful, that's great, but most of the time in my experience, when I click into an ad it's usually a mis-click, not because I'm genuinely interested in this ad. The advertisers need a way to reach more potential customers. Most advertisers are honest players in the game with real products or services to offer to users, trying to find ways to maximize the impression, click-through and conversion rate by optimizing their creatives, targeting, and bidding strategies etc. But there are always scammers that try to cheat the game, showing dodgy ads to rip off users whenever possible. Google as an ad-tech platform sits between these 3 parties, trying to show the most relevant ad from advertisers in a publisher's ad-slot to the user. But the system has evolved into a complex maze over the years that likely nobody knows the full picture any more. New legal requirements and regulatory policies and industry landscape shifts keep pushing the system to extremes. There are teams to fight ad spams, but there are also business goals to make more money to fund the AI initiatives. The scammers keep finding new loopholes in the system, and the teams fighting the scammers are often steps behind, due to limited resource and budget. End result is many dodgy ads keep slipping through the policy filters. In an ideal world, ad-tech platforms should optimize for satisfying all 3 parties at the same time: publishers, advertisers, and end users, in addition to making money for themselves. But that's probably hard to achieve, given the dynamic nature of the world. AI can help fight scams, but AI can also help finding loopholes in the scam-fighting system. It's a sad state of the world.
  • BLKNSLVR 13d ago
    > Most advertisers are honest players in the game with real products or services to offer to users Yeah, but > trying to find ways to maximize the impression, click-through and conversion rate by optimizing their creatives, targeting, and bidding strategies etc Rapidly turns them malicious and anti-human, preying on psychological bugs. > End result is many dodgy ads keep slipping through the policy filters. Therefore their platform / process is not fit for purpose, no advertising platform has effectively solved scaling.
• leoc 13d ago
  As usual, "Google" here means the two individual human beings who together have a controlling interest in Google, Page and Brin. It may also mean some other people, but it certainly means them. To be clear, that's not to suggest that everything dubious about Google can be put on their shoulders. Some Google issues are genuinely hard to solve; some are deep enough in the weeds that they may plausibly never have heard of them or not have time for them. AdSense being a sewer doesn't seem to be one of those.
• ricardobeat 13d ago
  There is a well known problem in the Netherlands where scammers will set up fake museum websites, like “vangoghtickets.co”. They don’t even collect the money - your card details are instantly stolen and used for some odd looking purchases in south east asia or something. I’ve reported these multiple times. They always get to the top of search results via paid placement, and Google always responds to the reports saying they found nothing wrong with them, even when provided with detailed evidence of the fraud.
• jeffybefffy519 13d ago
  Money is the answer
• kentonv 13d ago
  Here's another one for you. If you search for any popular book on Google Play Books, you get a whole bunch of fake knock-offs alongside the real book. Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to tell which one is real. And they, apparently, won't do anything about it. A couple months ago I went searching for the book "Regime Change" by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, an NYT bestseller. The top search result at the time used the exact official cover art and author names, and was otherwise in every way indistinguishable from the real book. I foolishly bought it and started reading. I quickly noticed that the text seemed like more of a mediocre college paper than a bestselling book. After a few pages I was like... wtf is this. Jumped to the end of the book and found an "Abort the author" section naming a fellow named Marcus Whitfield as the author. I dutifully opened a ticket with Google suggesting that they should really remove this book. They refunded me, but told me they couldn't remove the book because their policy states that only the true copyright holder could request a take down, and I am not that. WTF? I wasn't even claiming a copyright issue. I was claiming false advertising and fraud. I was claiming that Google Play's store was listing an obviously, maliciously fake book, selling it for real money, and that they should stop doing that. They take a 30% cut! How are they not doing even the most basic vetting of these listings? A human could trivially identify it as fake in 30 seconds and an AI even faster. It appears that since then, the actual real book has risen to #1 in the search results (I think; it's hard to tell), and the exact listing that got me is gone, but there are still a whole lot of obvious fakes after it: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=%22regime%20change%22&c=books&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/search?q=%22regime%20change%22... And if you search for any other popular book, you get the same thing. (Of course, no real publisher actually cares about Google Play Books, because nobody uses it, so nobody files takedown requests, presumably. Also presumably no engineers work on it, and that's why it's a wasteland. What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down?)
  • BLKNSLVR 13d ago
    > "Abort the author" Shame that was untrue. > What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down Likely just because it's profitable enough. If nothing else, that seems to be the #1 guiding principle.
    • 12d ago
• ezoe 13d ago
  Because nobody is prosecuted for scam and malicious ads. People at Alphabet and all website owners which use AdSense and showed scam and malicious ads must be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced jail time in order to stop this mess. But it looks like all the countries are busy age restricting Internet instead. By age restricting, it means private information gathering which fuel ad companies more.
• mococa 13d ago
  Gezus… If you see my mother-in-law cellphone. It is impossible to use <period>. Full of ads crap that she probably installed by following ads… Remember IE toolbars?
• algoth1 13d ago
  Money
• shevy-java 13d ago
  > AI is really good at detecting deceptive adverts - why isn’t Google using it? Because Google is an adCompany. It will not do anything about ads - quite the opposite, it has fought down ublock origin. Everyone sees that.
• OtomotO 13d ago
  Because they make money by that. Sometimes simple answers are not only elegant, but capture the essence of a problem.
• diogenescynic 13d ago
  I previously noted that the top search result for Claude Code was linking to a spyware website. It's crazy how this stuff is not monitored at all.
• rinconrex 13d ago
  Well, as others have said money. As far as I know ads are the domain of the FTC and FCC. Who's going to stop them from serving scammy ads? Not Carr, not the FTC commissioners. As much as I personally disliked Susan Wojcicki, she kinda sort kept Youtube shenanigans in check. Yes, there were baity, inappropriate ads, but after she left it has gotten out of control. Google signaled with "Lake America" they are playing along, and I don't think any real consquences will come of it as long as they keep pulling in billions and the QoQ keeps going.
• fHr 13d ago
  because they're greedy capitalist mfs making a lot of money of scams
• edd2 13d ago
  Sigh. I reported months ago that Google's continual growth rate in revenues from Ads should be heeded with caution - its not from AI/LLMs. They are juicing and juicing and juicing their existing assets for all the cash flows they can generate! That's why the revenues keep growing. They did not go to such extremities in the past - and they probably strategically held back. Meta is facing the same predicament btw - both entities claim the growth is coming from new AI investments. The amount of impersination/Scam ad's I've seen on IG is hilarious. That is a flat out lie its from investments they made pre-LLM hype + efficiency gains.
• gdevenyi 13d ago
  People still see ads?
  • aembleton 12d ago
    Yes. This is where most of Googles and Metas revenue comes from.
• chadgpt2 13d ago
  [dead]
• eranation 13d ago
  This is include ads that impersonate google services, e.g. "your google translate has expired, upgrade to a new version". Reporting it to google is like yelling at a wall. Or worse, yelling at a wall after a few million years will slowly erode it due to the air friction.
• CM30 13d ago
  Frankly speaking, because no-one is forcing them to stop serving them. That's the biggest 'trick' companies like Google have pulled here. They've somehow tricked the regulators into thinking that because they're big companies serving a lot of customers over the internet, that any sort of fraud or product liability laws are irrelevant to them. Because any other company doing this would get sued into oblivion, shut down and the executives criminally charged. If a brick and mortar business let blatant scammers and criminals advertise in their physical stores, that would be seen as a serious crime. Same with a retailer that sold dangerous or counterfeit products, or one that turned their stores into surveillance panopticons where customer data was collected illegally and sold to the highest bidder. Google, Amazon, Meta etc are doing things that would get a normal business owner sent to prison. The solution isn't just technical, it's about being willing to enforce the law for internet businesses the same way we do for offline ones. If Sundar Pichai and the board were looking at 10-20 years in prison for fraud or cyber offences, then Google would fix those dodgy ads real quick...
  • makeitdouble 13d ago
    > because they're big companies serving a lot of customers over the internet, that any sort of fraud or product liability laws are irrelevant to them. Is it false ? As much as we can lament the current state of affair, we must acknowledge everything that has been thrown at any of the bigger companies has resulted in slap on the wrists at most. At this exact moment in the US money is straight power, in it's rawest form.
    • CM30 13d ago
      Well no and that's the problem. Many governments (especially the United States one) are complicit in this. They don't do nearly enough to keep corporate power in check. If they really wanted to fix these issues, antitrust could be a real thing again, and companies like Google would be forcefully broken up and barred from remerging later down the line. If Google doesn't have Gmail, Chrome, Android or YouTube and all these things are separate businesses, then their power is severely curtailed. They could also arrest CEOs, board members and other people with a large amount of power at these organisations and charge them for the actions of the business. Or levvy percentage based fines that obliterate the company's ability to function. Could Google function if it was charged 50-60% of a year's worldwide revenue until an issue was fixed? It'd probably have to cut way back on everything in that scenario. The issue is that the government has been so thoroughly captured by corporate interests that noone faces meaningful consequences if they earn more than a billion dollars a year.
• LeoPanthera 13d ago
  Apple News does this too. In some ways it's actually worse. It's a real problem, and those who are less technologically ept are inevitably going to be scammed. I expect a lot more from Apple than I do from Google, so it's surprising that it's been going on for so long.
  • al_borland 13d ago
    I find Apple News to be so frustrating. Even way I paid for the premium service, so much of the content was behind paywalls, and the ads are so pervasive that it was a truly awful experience. I have to believe Tim Cook never actually tried to use it. I don’t know how any executive using that app could allow it out the door… not at a company that claims to pride themselves on providing a good user experience.
• BLKNSLVR 13d ago
  Based on prior FBI recommendations to use ad blockers to keep yourself safe from scams[0], it seems that the various methods of blocking/avoiding Youtube ads should also be recommended. Use as many of the tools as possible to escape the suck of the scam-hole that Google has made the Internet: Firefox + uBlock Origin: https://ublockorigin.com/ https://ublockorigin.com/ Brave Browser Invidious: https://invidious.io/ https://invidious.io/ Revanced: https://revanced.app/ https://revanced.app/ SkyTube: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/free.rm.skytube.oss/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/free.rm.skytube.oss/ Clipious (app client for Invidious instances): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.lamarios.clipious/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.lamarios.clipious... I've said this before, elsewhere, with this kind of thing plus the LG / Smart TV surveillance, it feels as if we're living in the paperclip maximiser world, except it's "advertising" instead of paperclips. [0]: https://www.securityweek.com/fbi-recommends-ad-blockers-cybercriminals-impersonate-brands-search-engine-ads/ https://www.securityweek.com/fbi-recommends-ad-blockers-cybe... Edited to add: Remember when 'piracy funds terrorism' was a thing? Surely Google is providing material assistance in funding organised crime and / or terrorism in their reckless indifference to what they allow their platform to promote?
• geekamongus 13d ago
  This type of shit is why I refuse to give up my pi-hole, uBlock, and Firefox.
• calny 13d ago
  I was irritated by this exact same misleading ad a few weeks ago and tweeted about it into the void. Kudos for the author for trying to do something about it.
• VinnyBarreca 13d ago
  Facebook too. There are so many scams being promoted on FB, which is strange because both Facebook and Google ads used to be really strict about what they approved. Now, it seems like they just approve anything.
• gverrilla 13d ago
  Mere consequences of the "free market". Applying the so-called "Hanlon's razor" to one of the most malicious actors in the planet is borderline delusional (or malicious :P ).
• collabs 13d ago
  My opinion is that someone somewhere is paying for those ads and Google needs to get positive identification of a human being for any ad. Google has a near monopoly so there is no reason Google can't force this requirement arbitrarily. Once you have positive identification, suspend them pending further investigation if they serve any dodgy ad. I will be genuinely surprised if Google makes any money off of these dodgy ads. How? Like how does this money flow? Where does it come from? There has to be a way to enforce positive identification, right? Google already does this for Google play developers. I can't use a US credit card to pay for the USD 25 fee for a student on Bangladesh for example because I understand the payment method is one of the signals they use to make sure the student developer is a real person. Is this something Google won't do on its own without being forced to act?
  • vikarti 12d ago
    Potential issues: - There are some well-known ways around developer verification (peopl in some countries _need_ them for one reason or another so - they use non-local cards,etc) - it's very basic verification and people who pay for ads likely arleady do it (payment have to come from somewhere). - Proof of address is also spoofable and there are some situations were people making/providing fakes when they don't mean ill intent towards anybody else (example: Russia, some of ways to make non-Russian-only Visa/MC require making fake proof) but such methods could also be abused for doing actual harm. - ID verification sometimes complicated if a lot of countries are involved. Example: I'm not at all sure at least one person in Google actually knew what Abhazian passport is and how to verify it ?
    • literallywho 12d ago
      These are pathetic excuses for a company with 400 billion in revenue. If they can't afford to hire people and develop systems, that means they don't have a viable business model that doesn't rely on scamming. Simple as that. I'm so tired of such excuses used for companies that make insane profits. What, they get to do that because alternatives are too complicated? I'm too stupid to get a phd in [insert field here], so I should be able to make a living running scams? These are the people who are claiming to work on AI and potentially AGI. Utterly ridiculous.
• CHB0403085482 13d ago
  This is one reason why you have adblock...
• ambione 13d ago
  google once served me an ad for what I'm pretty sure was CP, and i never reported it to anyone out of fear that just by being served a link to that kind of horrible shit I was somehow going to get in trouble over it. Sounds ridiculous, but as a nobody, pissing off a giga-corporation in an era owned by them probably was the better choice for my financial and overall well-being, even if it felt cowardly. Besides, epstein's guests roam free, unimpeded, and continue with impunity, what positive outcome could I have possibly hoped for?
• bashtoni 13d ago
  Don't be evil -> What does "evil" really mean, anyway? -> Judgements about good and evil don't belong in business -> Evil is pretty profitable, actually
  • edwinjm 12d ago
    That’s why we have laws
• razorbeamz 13d ago
  Simple: They don't care.
• didip 13d ago
  Spam/Scam filtering should have been the perfect place to show case SOTA AI. Why Google & Meta have not been able to do so? Relatedly, DMCA should be expanded to harmful ads content.
• maitola 13d ago
  Because that’s how they make money. Same reason Meta doesn’t flag fake news/information and actually even amplifies and serves it in echo chambers. It’s a business model. They do it because they can. No one is stopping them. Why would they leave the money on the table?
• Marol 13d ago
  Cloaking. Google bans people, but mostly the innocent ones. If you're running blackhat, you've built a setup that gives you very good avoidance, and the bans are calculated into your sheets. The reviewer and the system sees something else than the customer clicking the ad. And even if they get banned, they will just burn a cc and domain and then get back to printing after a few hours. While a legitimate business never suspects it can get banned, and when it does, the process is Kafkaesque. Our case: a month of back and forth on the appeal, no success. The best we got was a suggestion to read the TOS and check whether we had any "brand affiliations" we don't have in real life. Previous replies were pasted slop. We don't have any affiliations, and we still have no clue what they were talking about. Meanwhile our conversion rate on other ad platforms was decimated by us constantly changing stuff to please the Google reviewer.
• maxlin 12d ago
  Because they get paid and can always wait before banning them without fingers pointing at them too hard.
• slopblast 12d ago
  Google's abandoning of 'do no evil' has hastened their becoming dodgy themselves, not just the ads they serve up, but the way they serve you and your data up.
• bariswheel 12d ago
  [flagged]
• cwillu 12d ago
  Google itself serves similar ads for its own services in all its properties. I've been “critically low” on google storage space for several years now, and every google app prompts and notifies and nags about it on every launch.
  • genrader 12d ago
    This is untrue and you have to be at least 80%
    • cwillu 12d ago
      It is absolutely true, and above 80% leaves me with 40gb of empty capacity, which is so much excess headroom that I will simply never exhaust it.
  • acomjean 12d ago
    I get those. To be fair they're asking for you to pay for some of the storage you are using for free. They have some tools to help clean up, but not enough... They'll keep nagging. I mean apple music/tv/icloud are always pinging me with "free 3 month subscriptions". MS is no better with the "lets finish setting up your pc with one drive..." to which the options are [yes/ remind me again later] I've moved mostly to linux and its refresing. -A
    • cwillu 12d ago
      I do pay, for more than what I need. I have 40gb free of 200gb, and my usage patterns have changed such that I will never fill the remainder up.
      • acomjean 12d ago
        Huh. For me it was start nagging aggressively at 90% full, but if I deleted enough it kept the nags at bay for a while. In some ways the non smart nags are ok with me. We have food ording app in Boston called toast. They decided to get reviews for food orders and time those requests pretty much perfectly after your done eating. It’s weird and somewhat fascinating how they do that.
• donkeylazy456 12d ago
  kidnapping ads, scrolling dark patterns, nsfw context ads, fake medicines... i would prefer paywall instead.
• roger_maddux_iv 12d ago
  [dead]
• karim79 12d ago
  I think the answer is, that's always been Google's business and not much has really changed. Advertising accounts for about 78% of their total revenue.
• remusrm 12d ago
  [dead]
• ChaoStatiX 12d ago
  I believe Google already has systems in place to block malicious ads and is actively running them. In fact, according to last year's 'Ads Safety Report 2025,' Google blocked over 8.3 billion bad ads in a single year. Of course, despite these efforts, the sheer volume of ads being uploaded makes it practically impossible to catch every single one of them. Therefore, rather than simply criticizing the issue in a negative light, we should recognize and appreciate the platform's ongoing efforts to clean up its ecosystem.
  • edwinjm 12d ago
    The story’s not about blocking every possible malicious ad, it’s about making a report and still letting the ad through. The ad probably looks at the IP address, sees its from Google and show a legitimate ad. Google can easily solve this with using external IP addresses, but doesn’t. Because money. There’s nothing to appreciate here.
• radium3d 12d ago
  Not just dodgy but downright malware links. It's insane. had one with a full screen mcafee level scam. Dropping the ball Google.
• MiroslavPokorny 12d ago
  Because they get paid ?
• jrm4 12d ago
  This strikes me as a very silly question? Because they can. There's no meaningful way to prevent them from doing so.
• cube00 12d ago
  It's interesting that in the beginning Google would prominently display "Ads by Google" [1] which they've since hidden behind the "info" icon because they don't want their name associated with these scam ads. [1]: https://malcontentcomics.com/systemsboy/2009/09/the-google-adsense-experience.html https://malcontentcomics.com/systemsboy/2009/09/the-google-a...
• thewhitetulip 12d ago
  Funny how AI is AGI and yet ad companies don't use AI to scan for scam ads but they might lock you out of your account via automated review
• wraptile 12d ago
  Ha we use AI to detect dodgy ads with great success for our customers but the bottleneck is still the takedown. The dodgy ads always hit at least some amount of traffic just because google doesn't offer sufficient auditing tools for detecting these fast enough. So this has to be a problem google solves before the ad actually launches for best effectiveness.
• ksajadi 12d ago
  My girlfriend just got scammed by a super convincing ad for UK Visa which looks identical to the real thing. I have no idea how you can get that wording and that landing page get passed the google review. I’ve done a lot of ads on google and every time my ad was just a little off (use of trademark word or competitor’s name with a reserved keyword) it will be blocked.
  • disillusioned 12d ago
    My wife was searching for an Our Place rice cooker, because we had just bought one for $149 and she wanted to show my dad. Up popped an insanely authentic looking branded OurPlace ad highlighting the exact same rice cooker, but for only $49! Insane deal! She clicked it, it was basically ourplacce.it, but like, not an easy thing to flag on her phone. Made it all the way through the purchase process until I got this from Citi: Please use only to complete your purchase with Grand Egypti for 9000.00 EGP using card ending 3551 I'm like "what the hell are you buying?" and sure enough, it's all scams the whole way down. There's simply no excuse for Google to not use their advanced AI to block this sort of copycat/lookalike/impersonation scam every day of the week, at scale. The excuse, obviously, is revenue, but it's really upsetting how many people it's hurting.
• alex1138 12d ago
  Ah, yes. The standard pipeline scammy ad/post -> report -> This Does Not Violate Our ... Bonus points if you can get banned for any reason, by contrast, on sites like Facebook Fuck all of you. Shut them all down, jail time for execs
  • cindyllm 12d ago
    [dead]
• sshussain270 12d ago
  Surprisingly, it hasn't changed much on the ad front after AI/LLM boom. I don't know if its because advertising is a "non-sexy" market and no one really wants to do it but better is expected.
• oliwarner 12d ago
  It's bizarre to me that there isn't any KYC in advertising. Seemingly any foreign money can buy adverts for anything and redirect traffic. For a long time, you could host your own adverts, put your own script on third party sites. I'm not sure if this is still a thing but judging from the screenshots, maybe it is. Madness. If you want to advertise, you should have to prove you're selling what you're advertising in the market you're advertising it in. You should have to prove who you are. If you're caught doing dodgy crap, you should be held responsible. And if you've taken billions over two decades in advertising, and you don't regularly test the adverts you host, you should be liable for the damage they create.
• relaxfolio 12d ago
  [dead]
• anilakar 12d ago
  We have had end users scammed because Android QR code readers show scammy "pay now" ads. We do not support online payment but that does not prevent non-technical people from clicking large UI element-like ads and entering their credit card information on nondescript online payment pages.
• NietTim 12d ago
  Because it makes them money and for some reason people (and governments) have accepted their lie that they can't police this. Comparison to the olden days; if a paper magazine knowingly allowed scammers to advertise they 110% would've been prosecuted. It is really weird that we let google (and others suchs as meta!) get away with this. Some comments make it seem like this is a new thing, it's not, this has been going on for at least 10 years now.
• OhNoNotAgain_99 12d ago
  [dead]
• cloudie78 12d ago
  Because it makes them money. In other news, water is wet.
• elAhmo 12d ago
  Because they make money of them.
• gamedeception 12d ago
  Pretty wild that its possible
• egorfine 12d ago
  They are too busy banning my local bakery ads because my account was registered 25 years ago in Ukraine while the bakery I'm trying to post ads for is in Poland. Clearly a fraud.
  • mrweasel 12d ago
    Probably a question of who Google thinks you're attempting to defraud. If Google believes that they'll lose money, they might act more swiftly, compared to the cases when a user on a random website lose $20, but Google still gets it's cut.
• alexpotato 12d ago
  There is a similar point to be made about those fake "update on your loan" robocalls. - The carriers know, for a fact, that these are spam calls. - The spammers know that the carriers know this as well. - The payout on a successful scam is large - Because of the above the scammers are willing to pay VERY large sums to the carriers - The carriers are willing to take the scammers money Nothing is surprising to me about this except the last point. Seems like "allowing people to pee in your pool, for a price" is very short term thinking. That being said, maybe it's like that old SNL parody ad [0]: "We're the phone company and we don't care. Why? Because we don't have to." (for the younger folks, Bell Telephone was a monopoly back then. That's less true now but true enough for the economics to kick in for them) 0 - https://vimeo.com/355556831 https://vimeo.com/355556831
• surcap526 12d ago
  [dead]
• vladde 12d ago
  reported an obvious MrBeast youtube scam ad. reported it and got the same response that it did not go against their guidelines.
• gwbas1c 12d ago
  I had a similar thing happen on LinkedIn: For awhile I was getting a lot of recruiters that had an enticing job description, and when I responded, they just wanted me to join a job board. (There was no position.) When I reported them, they said the recruiters didn't violate LinkedIn's policy. (But they somehow stopped anyway. I guess LinkedIn actually listens to its customers.)
• LocalH 12d ago
  Money
• victorbvieira 12d ago
  [flagged]
• red-iron-pine 12d ago
  because they're a publicly traded company and need to make number go higher why is this a discussion?
• polinaLispr 12d ago
  [flagged]
• Roenald56 12d ago
  [dead]