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.

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.

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)

If you are reliant on ad revenue, you should be expressing your displeasure to google right now.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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

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.

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/

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?

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!

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.

Now, it seems like they just approve anything.

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.

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.

[1]: https://malcontentcomics.com/systemsboy/2009/09/the-google-a...

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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/

there are no ads with NewPipe.

Firefox + uBlock Origin: https://ublockorigin.com/

Brave Browser

Invidious: https://invidious.io/

Revanced: https://revanced.app/

SkyTube: 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...

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-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?

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...

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?)

Relatedly, DMCA should be expanded to harmful ads content.

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...

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.

2023: $32B

2025: $91B

2027: $300B (projected)

2029: $400B (projected)

“I’m happy to go bankrupt rather than lose this race” -Larry Page

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.

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.

They'll act if someone threatens to sue otherwise Google doesn't give a shit as long as they get paid.

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.

more like why company still want to receive money ????? is more correct term

Because they can. There's no meaningful way to prevent them from doing so.

Sometimes simple answers are not only elegant, but capture the essence of a problem.

It's not like they face any consequences for being party to fraud. Laws are for poor people.

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.

Simple as that.

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.

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.

why is this a discussion?

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.

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.

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.

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

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?”

Don't be Evil

Ask me another.

:)

In other news, water is wet.

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.