Not to distract from Meta but I’m surprised Google doesn’t also get heat for this. A number of phishing sites win >30% of the auction on my company’s brand keywords and I see it on many others as well, especially in CPG and e-commerce. I’ve yet to have any luck getting Google to ban the advertisers.
3 or 4 years ago I tried Google Adwords to see if I could gain new customers. I admit I had a niche business, it was already successful, but I had read prior about certain tech companies overcharging - - or not cancelling services after you requested, so I opted to use only pre-paid credit cards bought at my local drug store. I chose $200 limit per card. That lasted for about 1.5 to 2 years, several times Google emailed me that my card expired or ran out of $$, and I needed to correct the error. That's when I bought another pre-paid card for a limit of $200 and funded my acct again. I never noticed any uptick in customers contacting me from my websites.
Eventually Google shut down the ability to use pre-paid credit cards (it came back an error when I attempted to enter the new card no) and that's when I closed my account. Their response was too obvious evidence <Goggle in conspiracy with the ad click bots> desired the ability to scam my account and one day I would check my email and get a $5,000 bill.
There is a rather obvious "conflict of interest" when you have to dispute a charge with your credit card provider knowing that the credit card co is fully aware they only make their "cut" if the charge goes through.
Prepaid credit cards tend to be a very common fraud vector (very similar to gift card scams).
For chargebacks, the merchant has to pay at least a $15 fee on every chargeback, regardless of the outcome of the result. It's why many merchants prefer for you to contact them and ask for a refund rather than going through the chargeback process. For small purchases, merchants tend to just refund rather than dealing with an angry customer that's going to charge back.
It is profoundly ironic that Meta is apparently using cloaking techniques against regulators. Cloaking is a black-hat technique where you show one version of a landing page to the ad review bot (e.g., a blog about health) and a different version to the actual user (e.g., a diet pill scam).
Meta has spent years building AI to detect when affiliates cloak their links. Now, according to this report, Meta is essentially cloaking the ads themselves from journalists and regulators by likely filtering based on user profiling, IP ranges, or behavioral signals. They are using the sophisticated targeting tools intended for advertisers to target the "absence" of scrutiny.
"First, they identified the top keywords and celebrity names that Japanese Ad Library users employed to find the fraud ads. Then they ran identical searches repeatedly, deleting ads that appeared fraudulent from the library and Meta’s platforms."
That doesn't sound like cloaking. They really are deleting the ads. They're just concentrating on the ads that the regulators are most likely to see based on what they usually search for.
> The scrubbing, Meta teams explained in documents regarding their efforts to reduce scam discoverability, sought to make problematic content “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists.”
This seems to be the "smoking gun"... but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
Not quite. The ads themselves aren't deleted but only not displayed for a subset of keywords. If the ads were deleted no keyword would be able to show these.
I do not yet know if there's wrongdoing here, but even if it was screaming bad, all US government enforcement bodies have been gutted and made completely subservient to the will of the president rather than their legislatively mandated mission, under a novel "unitary executive" philosophy.
Further, that unitary executive is completely corrupt, and has already been paid off by Meta. Ukraine is a model of clean government with proper anti-corruption investigations and teeth compared to the US.
You are expecting third party countries to begin litigation on crimes that happen outside of their borders - even if they're not even strictly illegal where they're headquartered?
That shit never happens, and if it would, you'd first have to start jailing lots of S&P CEOs for the companies crimes that are committed in other countries and never amount to anything, precisely for the same reason.
Like literally every company thats involved in any mining, drilling etc. They always don't adhere to local environmental regulations etc
What? No, you are completely wrong. The crime was committed in many places. In the USA, but also in several EU countries (Germany included).
In fact, the numbers were more than 10x higher in the EU (since we use a lot more diesel cars) than what they were in the USA.
600 000 vehicles were affected in the USA, while 8.5 million vehicles were affected in the EU.
USA courts, effectively, issued a fine more than 200x higher per vehicle affected, than what we did in the EU.
No one that actually followed the news (and isn't German and therefore completely biased) will say with a straight face that EU justice system didn't favor VW due to established interests. The German government obviously manipulated the judicial system all over Europe to let the case go away.
It also says a lot, that it had to be the Americans bringing the case to light. A lot of people probably knew, but the control that the Germans had (and still have) over European economy and judicial systems didn't allow anyone inside the EU to speak up.
The original reuters article quotes Meta as claiming that making them harder to find by removing them from the system. This article doesn't offer any evidence to suggest that Meta is lying. This is lazy and poor reporting as far as I'm concerned.
Restaurant seen throwing waste in dumpster after removing it from food inspector's plate. Insists there's no other waste on other plates, apparently without checking.
What proportion of the scam ads do you think this approach caught?
>Restaurant seen throwing waste in dumpster after removing it from food inspector's plate. Insists there's no other waste on other plates, apparently without checking.
That seems... kinda reasonable?
Health inspector: "hey it looks like your ice machine is dirty, and you're not keeping foods at a hot enough temperature"
Restaurant: "ok we'll clean our ice machines more carefully and install thermometers to monitor the temperature of our hot trays"
Journalist: "Restaurant made health violations harder to find instead of removing them!"
Would it be better if the restaurant was proactively fixing issues before the health inspector brought it up? Yes. Does it make sense to imply that the restaurant was acting maliciously by making health violations "harder to find"? No.
I'm not sure, but starting with the ads that appear with most popular searches isn't a bad idea per se. It's a bit like sending law enforcement to protect popular areas.
Not to distract from Meta but I’m surprised Google doesn’t also get heat for this. A number of phishing sites win >30% of the auction on my company’s brand keywords and I see it on many others as well, especially in CPG and e-commerce. I’ve yet to have any luck getting Google to ban the advertisers.
I remember getting "lend us your google account" ad ON YOUTUBE of all places
My first question in 2026. Why does such company is allowed to exist and harm society?
Because money.
Because it is based in US.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838
3 or 4 years ago I tried Google Adwords to see if I could gain new customers. I admit I had a niche business, it was already successful, but I had read prior about certain tech companies overcharging - - or not cancelling services after you requested, so I opted to use only pre-paid credit cards bought at my local drug store. I chose $200 limit per card. That lasted for about 1.5 to 2 years, several times Google emailed me that my card expired or ran out of $$, and I needed to correct the error. That's when I bought another pre-paid card for a limit of $200 and funded my acct again. I never noticed any uptick in customers contacting me from my websites.
Eventually Google shut down the ability to use pre-paid credit cards (it came back an error when I attempted to enter the new card no) and that's when I closed my account. Their response was too obvious evidence <Goggle in conspiracy with the ad click bots> desired the ability to scam my account and one day I would check my email and get a $5,000 bill.
There is a rather obvious "conflict of interest" when you have to dispute a charge with your credit card provider knowing that the credit card co is fully aware they only make their "cut" if the charge goes through.
Prepaid credit cards tend to be a very common fraud vector (very similar to gift card scams).
For chargebacks, the merchant has to pay at least a $15 fee on every chargeback, regardless of the outcome of the result. It's why many merchants prefer for you to contact them and ask for a refund rather than going through the chargeback process. For small purchases, merchants tend to just refund rather than dealing with an angry customer that's going to charge back.
The original source is from Reuters article [0].
It is profoundly ironic that Meta is apparently using cloaking techniques against regulators. Cloaking is a black-hat technique where you show one version of a landing page to the ad review bot (e.g., a blog about health) and a different version to the actual user (e.g., a diet pill scam).
Meta has spent years building AI to detect when affiliates cloak their links. Now, according to this report, Meta is essentially cloaking the ads themselves from journalists and regulators by likely filtering based on user profiling, IP ranges, or behavioral signals. They are using the sophisticated targeting tools intended for advertisers to target the "absence" of scrutiny.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook...
"First, they identified the top keywords and celebrity names that Japanese Ad Library users employed to find the fraud ads. Then they ran identical searches repeatedly, deleting ads that appeared fraudulent from the library and Meta’s platforms."
That doesn't sound like cloaking. They really are deleting the ads. They're just concentrating on the ads that the regulators are most likely to see based on what they usually search for.
> The scrubbing, Meta teams explained in documents regarding their efforts to reduce scam discoverability, sought to make problematic content “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists.”
This seems to be the "smoking gun"... but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
> “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists.”
> but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
Good point, this quote could just be painting their actions in the poorest possible light.
Not quite. The ads themselves aren't deleted but only not displayed for a subset of keywords. If the ads were deleted no keyword would be able to show these.
So there's Dieselgate for Meta as there is Dieselgate for Honey
Both are American companies, not like VW, so not much will happen
What does this have to do with them being American? You do realize nothing much happened to VW in Europe, I hope.
VW executives went to prison:
https://qz.com/dieselgate-sentences-handed-down-1851782440
I do not yet know if there's wrongdoing here, but even if it was screaming bad, all US government enforcement bodies have been gutted and made completely subservient to the will of the president rather than their legislatively mandated mission, under a novel "unitary executive" philosophy.
Further, that unitary executive is completely corrupt, and has already been paid off by Meta. Ukraine is a model of clean government with proper anti-corruption investigations and teeth compared to the US.
Jail time [0] and billions of dollars in fines is “nothing much?”
0: https://apnews.com/article/volkswagen-germany-diesel-emissio...
Those billions are because of the USA. In the EU, it was merely a slap in the hand.
Annual revenue of VW at the time was 217B €. In the EU, they paid 1.5B €. So, 0.7% of their annual revenue for a scheme that went on for years.
Granted, in the US, they actually did persecute VW properly, and they ended up paying close to 30B $. A much proper sum.
As for the jail time, they arrested 2 from middle management in the EU. No member from the board or the CEO went to jail here.
Is that what we call justice now? Specially when we want to pretend we are superior to the USA in that regard?
The crime was committed in the USA.
You are expecting third party countries to begin litigation on crimes that happen outside of their borders - even if they're not even strictly illegal where they're headquartered?
That shit never happens, and if it would, you'd first have to start jailing lots of S&P CEOs for the companies crimes that are committed in other countries and never amount to anything, precisely for the same reason.
Like literally every company thats involved in any mining, drilling etc. They always don't adhere to local environmental regulations etc
> The crime was committed in the USA.
What? No, you are completely wrong. The crime was committed in many places. In the USA, but also in several EU countries (Germany included).
In fact, the numbers were more than 10x higher in the EU (since we use a lot more diesel cars) than what they were in the USA.
600 000 vehicles were affected in the USA, while 8.5 million vehicles were affected in the EU.
USA courts, effectively, issued a fine more than 200x higher per vehicle affected, than what we did in the EU.
No one that actually followed the news (and isn't German and therefore completely biased) will say with a straight face that EU justice system didn't favor VW due to established interests. The German government obviously manipulated the judicial system all over Europe to let the case go away.
It also says a lot, that it had to be the Americans bringing the case to light. A lot of people probably knew, but the control that the Germans had (and still have) over European economy and judicial systems didn't allow anyone inside the EU to speak up.
No justice was made over here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
The American Justice system. Many no longer trust in its willingness and ability to enforce the rule of law.
I posted in the other thread but in case that no longer has traction I will repeat my question here:
I'm still wondering what the Scam Prevention Framework enacted in Australia will do to mitigate this kind of stuff.
https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdb/au/legis/cth/conso... (Part IVF)
Easy solution: Don't patronize Meta.
The original reuters article quotes Meta as claiming that making them harder to find by removing them from the system. This article doesn't offer any evidence to suggest that Meta is lying. This is lazy and poor reporting as far as I'm concerned.
Reuters: Restaurant hides unsanitary waste from food inspectors by hiding it in dumpster.
Restaurant seen throwing waste in dumpster after removing it from food inspector's plate. Insists there's no other waste on other plates, apparently without checking.
What proportion of the scam ads do you think this approach caught?
>Restaurant seen throwing waste in dumpster after removing it from food inspector's plate. Insists there's no other waste on other plates, apparently without checking.
That seems... kinda reasonable?
Health inspector: "hey it looks like your ice machine is dirty, and you're not keeping foods at a hot enough temperature"
Restaurant: "ok we'll clean our ice machines more carefully and install thermometers to monitor the temperature of our hot trays"
Journalist: "Restaurant made health violations harder to find instead of removing them!"
Would it be better if the restaurant was proactively fixing issues before the health inspector brought it up? Yes. Does it make sense to imply that the restaurant was acting maliciously by making health violations "harder to find"? No.
I'm not sure, but starting with the ads that appear with most popular searches isn't a bad idea per se. It's a bit like sending law enforcement to protect popular areas.