Comment by throwaw12
2 days ago
I have reported these ads to YouTube multiple times, because I tracked down their scam websites, but YouTube didn't delete them anyway.
Common pattern they had was:
- similar or same domains
- same messaging on their website
YouTube could have taken action, but it choose not to
I'm still waiting for the tech world to wake up and realise that the online ad machinery and user tracking software that the brightest minds of our generation have been working on are just a way to efficiently connect scammers with their unsuspecting victims.
Oh, they know that. It's very lucrative. At this point it's scams all the way up to the US presidential cryptocurrency.
However it's also a tricky business to be the adjudicator of what is and isn't a scam. You're going to have to deal with a lot of complaints from "legitimate businessmen".
I'm waiting for the non-tech world to wake up and hold companies that act as willing accomplices liable for the crimes they tolerate on their platforms.
> the crimes they tolerate on their platforms.
... the crimes they actually make a lot of money from.
The tech world knows this. They are raking in money off of these scams. People with a rudimentary moral compass leave, those without stay, which makes it even less likely that industry will self-sanitize. The rest of society, out of survival instinct if nothing else, will have to force it to stop anti-social and fraudulent practices. Same as many other industries.
It would help to stop saying "brightest minds of our generation", like we stopped saying "smartest guys in the room".
They are not the brightest, just the ones who sold out others and grabbed the money, with ethics and morals not being sufficient personal barriers.
Calling them the brightest just feeds their belief that they merit the money, and they don't have to ask the real reason they have so much money.
They already know. Meta estimates around 10% of its ad revenue comes from ads for scams or banned goods. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
(but enough about LLM shills)
I think being a “Techie” is now something that is splitting.
- People who want to work in tech because it was a stable and/or lucrative career
- People who just want/love to code
- People who loved tech / think tech is cool
There’s also a degree of counter-culture that used to be part of the mix, which got jettisoned as tech became mainstream and mapped out.
The current state of Tech is unpleasant and alarming.
I'm waiting for the tech world to realize that "the brightest minds of our generation" don't actually work at google, because if you are that enormously bright you don't want to work for ads or in an opaque megacorp.
Why does anyone think a brilliant mind would enjoy that? So they could make a little bit more money?
Do you honestly think brilliant people, the smartest of our generation, care about money?
IME, Google software devs aren't even the brightest minds in the parking lot.
Completing large engineering projects says nothing about individual capability, and nothing about how Google deploys shitty AI moderation and about how Google employees insist it's great and perfect and never does anything wrong gives me any reason to believe they are even competent.
It's literally a meme that people started repeating in earnest without a second thought.
Don't you think a brilliant person would work somewhere, like, interesting?
In economies where you aren't rewarded for individual competency (because software management couldn't pick out individual competency if it screamed at them), highly competent people aren't going to play the game, they are just going to find something to pay the bills and work on hobbies.
The smart people are often where the money isn't, because they are rarely driven by monetary pursuits.
There was a period when I was constantly showered with these ads whenever I visited YouTube. It quickly became clear that it was some kind of scam, but YouTube didn't do anything about it for years.
Does clicking on the ad cost the spammer a lot of money
Yes, which is one of two reasons why I use a blocker called adnauseum. It an adv locker that “clicks” on every single ad it sees, as well as hides it from my view. This makes my ad profile useless, and also costs them money.
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Depends on bot-detection and if its a CPC or CPA campaign
Once you realize how profitable it is, it's hard to stop. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10...
see Meta, which is operating like a crime syndicate, leveraging higher fees on scammers "to discourage" them, retaining their impact on supply side auction prices and well knowing many don't pay with their own credit cards.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates-rampan...
They didn't care about being a huge driver behind a genocide, why would they possibly care about people getting scammed out of cancer fundraiser donations. Once you find out that someone has worked at any point for Meta past say, 2020, you know everything you need about them.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Same. Even if they delete one it's usually delayed for 2-3 days. The worst part about scam ads is that they surface a day later from a different account with 0 changes to the ads themselves. You would think Google would fingerprint the assets but in the end they just don't care.
There's no incentive for them to comply with your request. Like Facebook, scam ads are a revenue stream for Google. The profitability usually offsets any negative PR or fallout that results from these platforms turning a blind eye to the point where their budget accounts for some percentage of scam income, leaving them to pick and choose when to take action while they actively make their platform increasingly hostile to users who want to protect themselves from said ads.
Google, the worlds biggest and best coconspiritor.
That's so Meta.
They also had a pattern of loudly crying kids in the beginning of the video, I thought they were faking, after a month they changed the style of start.
Scams are extremely high margin businesses and as such can spend very generously on advertising. Consequently the Googles of our world love them.
In my experience, anything related to Google Ads - they never reacts to any claims of scam…
Their incentives contradict healthy behavior… :(
Yep. Lately I've been getting dozens of scam ads for pulse oximeters being sold as Glucose meters, with a big ol' FDA logo plastered over the top of the video. A flagrant violation of regulations around medical device marketing.
Here's Google's response:
...which is a lie, among other things.
What struck me is that when I reported an ad with an Elon Musk deepfake selling some crypto scam, I got an email back from Google saying that after reviewing the video they found nothing wrong. I don't understand how this is not actionable in court- I mean, you did act on a report, you declare you manually reviewed the content and that it's good for you? I don't get it.
What's most depressing is that people like you did the right thing (took the time to investigate and report) and still hit a wall
reminder that according to Facebook's own analysis 10% of their 2024 revenue comes from scams and banned products