I suspect there are either employees or contractors getting a cut because even getting a legitimate ad that doesn’t break any rules through review can be an exercise in frustration.
I once spent days getting rejection after rejection for ads for a Christmas light show event at a vineyard (not winery, it was a dry event), on the grounds that I was apparently selling alcohol.
Meanwhile I get ads for black market cigarettes, shrooms, roids, cannabis, and anything else you can imagine.
Yes please I totally agree. Something big must be going on there. I once bought an item through an Instagram ad. For about a month I got fake updates about shipping. Then one day I get an email that itvwas delivered 2 days ago, complete with a different shipping path and an apparently real USPS tracking ID. Of course I received nothing. Complained to PayPal, the complaint was closed within minutes as not valid.
What compelled you to buy something through an ad? Does it often work? My operating assumption is that every click-through internet ad other than major brands (Apple, car makers, etc) is basically a scam.
Yeah, don't do that. Instagram ads are no different to the WURGLBIXY and HUYTVING and XORMLINAP and other smashed up syllable "brands" on Amazon, except they'll mostly deliver something to you, even if it is shit.
Take any of the images from an Instagram ad. Someone, somewhere, did (probably) build or design the product being sold (a lot come from Kickstarter and may have never launched), but if you search you'll find hundreds or more scams riding on that coattails who will hope to collect and fuck off with your money before IG shuts them down (if they ever do).
Same on X. It’s possible that the scammers just operate networks of credit cards and domains and rotate as soon as they grt flagged. Numbers game basically. But it’s also possible that the rules are applied differently to advertisers that bring in a lot of cash, regardless of legality.
I don't think it was Jack's fault, but Twitter went from something that (granted they did tend to do a few shady things from a UX perspective) was fine and largely worked but did have a massive censorship problem, to something that works less well (seriously? i can't see posts chronologically without an account? on TWITTER???) and apparently still has censorship (although I was mostly preoccupied with covid, actual doctors getting banned for truthful information, pre-Musk)
Exactly. Blatant scam ads are reported to no avail, and I see them still multiple times a day.
After reading Careless People, it became much more tangible. "Yes people are motivated by money", but Zuck and others at the top of FB actively make a point of expending significant effort to avoid fixing things. It's not that they don't know, or care, it's that they know and care about keeping the gravy train at full speed while they pat themselves on the back for being masters of the universe, so to speak.
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.
It's insane work when you just search "Coinbase" and literally the first or sponsored results are not Coinbase but scam sites. I've seen this first-hand in Google. Obviously SEO and DA isn't on their side so it has to just be like pay enough and you can push whatever you want.
My wife got hit by this. Click an ad for to a 100% fake site with deep discounts, put in her credit card, order never went through. I checked the advertiser and it was somewhere in China. A few days later, her CC was used to buy some gift cards online. At least it was a good learning experience.
Adding to this frustration is a 25yr registered 501(c)3 non-profit I volunteer for that holds an annual art festival. The festival proceeds go to funding educational materials. They've had an active facebook page for at least 15 years, with thousands of followers from around the world.
When the non-profit tried to advertise the art festival on Facebook. Facebook not only denied them, but when the non-profit asked for a review of the denial they were warned if they asked again their entire facebook page would be flagged and deleted.
Facebook is large enough I cannot imagine their reasoning. They very likely have several conflicting streams of logic depending on teams involved. One thing I think is reasonable is that money is a motivational factor for Facebook.
Put simply, organizations who come in immediately spending money on advertising are more likely to be fast tracked. Organizations who don't spent a lot of money are more likely to be shut down. ("you've been a freeloader all this time who will likely not pay sustainably after this one-time payment. We're focusing on sustainable paying customers, goodbye")
Addition: Now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a literal metric of "money/time" ratio. The more money you spend in less time likely improves your chances of being fast-tracked, thus biasing new accounts who immediately spend on advertising over existing ones who sparsely pay.
Having worked in advertiser support: fb pages are basically an unsupported product and their support channels for advertising are farmed out to the lowest bidder.
They do bucket out support into spend tiers, although when I was there it was overall spend, not frequency
I deleted my facebook. Its the only thing I can do it seems and I advice everyone to do the same. Screw this platform. Facebook’s scams have caused the elders in my family so much pain and me so much stress dealing with it, its not worth it. A monopolistic cancer on society.
Are people still using Facebook in 2026? I sometimes go back to my Facebook account, it is a complete wasteland, my feed is just generic doomscroll material, nothing new from actual people I know. Communities I follow mostly moved to Discord, it is also no longer where events like festivals post their latest news. Facebook looks like it is #1 on paper, but my experience is completely different, it is nothing like it was 10 years ago, in fact, a significant portion of my Facebook feed is "remember 5-10 years ago".
Some of the best B2C customers are on FB — willing to spend, low expectations, low maintenance.
If you add IG to the mix, it’s even better.
Your typical HNer does not really fall into “ideal customer” profile for most B2C businesses. Our saving grace is our above average income profile. Other than that, on average we are tolerated rather than sought after (imho).
Facebook marketplace has completely taken over the used sales business in my area (Pacific Northwest). Craigslist is dead, offer up is dead, FB marketplace won.
It's become a defacto forum for a lot of local niche stuff like clubs, schools, non profits, and other special interest groups.
In my area there are groups related to a lot of different outdoor activities , and they share information, trip reports, etc. There might be some other forums for that, but they aren't as widely used or frequently updated.
I might look at my feed* perhaps 2-3 times a week; despite this, there's a good chance only one of my friends has posted anything new. Unfortunately, that particular friend is also a fairly cliché left-of-the-Cuban-Communist-Party (no, seriously) activist and 95% of her posts are "signal boosting" things I, a Brit living in Germany, do not have any connection to, e.g. "Demexit memes" or Bernie Sander's opinions about anything.
Doesn't help that this trillion dollar corporation still can't handle rotation metadata*, so if I see something and I want to share it, even if it's a good fit for my feed, 50% chance the pic looks stupid the moment I've uploaded it, to which I respond "ugh, never mind then" and forget about trying to solve this and don't post it.
I purposely don't use mine. They keep shadow profiles on you, if you're in IL you can sue them (there already was a lawsuit about it) and get some money from them.
I completely agree. I did this many years ago. The only thing that annoys me is that for many local things it’s the only option. I’m actually significantly less informed and involved in the local community because things are so heavily reliant on Facebook, and I refuse to sign back up.
I left Facebook over a decade ago, and it was painful to realize how many people simply forgot that I exist, and how many events I missed because many people exclusively use it to invite people.
Similar experience where I met someone in 2017 and was enraptured with them, and we eventually drifted apart because they only communicated through Snapchat and Instagram.
I often wonder if abstaining from the platforms that I dislike was worth the increase in loneliness and detachment from society, but I don't have access to the alternative universe where I decided to grit my teeth and accept the data hoarding companies and dark patterns as a tradeoff for being able to interact with people who couldn't care less about the technicalities.
Because companies have only existed for a few hundred years and we still haven't caught up with the idea of making things they do illegal. We tend to pass responsibility to the people who make up the company, rather than the corporation, but the people have gotten pretty good at making it impossible to assign blame to any individual. And you can't cost the owners (shareholders), because of course none of them are at fault, either.
Who at Meta is responsible for posting scam ads? Nobody. But Meta isn't responsible, either. So some executive makes a halfhearted promise to do something about it, but without any accountability.
The "limited liability" was just supposed to be for debts, but it turned out to be good for laundering responsibility, too. Originally, corporations had fixed term charters. And it might be worth looking at that again.
We need to start holding executives accountable for things going on in their companies, and go as far as holding board members, and if its an external company then hold them accountable as well, and their board members. Just go all the way on accountability to the point where it becomes hard to mess around because someone will freak out. I wonder how many "save my skin" whistleblowers we will see at the executive level if everyone at the top of a company can be held liable for stuff like this, that goes on for over a decade. Its pretty obvious Facebook KNOWS there's fraud, but they willfully do nothing, harming consumers everywhere.
What you would see is firms divesting from companies that do this to save their own skins too, so funds would dry up if they don't remediate it.
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.
Not to mention Uber's little program to detect whether a rider was likely to be law/code enforcement in cities where there were restrictions on Uber operations.
Not sure why this only seems to happen with IG ads, but I've noticed twice already that i'll purchase something on IG for a fixed price, and it will automatically enroll me into a monthly subscription plan without any chance to cancel it. Further, the subscription can then not be cancelled without email interaction -- no web-based cancellation.
The checkout screen had no mention of a subscription or any cost of a subscription, so not even sure how this is legal.
It has not gotten to the point where I dont make any purchase via IG. I'll independently search for the product and purchase it (usually less expensively via Amazon.com).
Not sure how this is good for IG, because the attribution is then not matched on the purchase. Further, not sure how this is even good for the merchant, since I'll inevitably have to do a chargeback.
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.
On the other hand, prepaid credit cards seem to be one of the only ways to prevent merchants from "running up" the charges on a customers account. Sure, a customer can go through the dispute process but it's quite a hassle. Just "limiting the amount of money you place on the table" is quite effective. Giving a merchant your credit card with say a $5,000 or more available balance seems like insanity, like laying out 50 of $100 bills on the table: "here, go ahead, can I trust you to take only what you should" ? I would pay extra to have a VISA or MC credit card that only offers say a $200 limit, just for dubious situations, but again, providers have a "conflict of interest" in that they only make their "cut" when the charges go through, so the more and the larger the charges - - the more "cut" they obtain.
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.
The issue as I see it is that these searches are run when testers look for them, not on a regular basis. If Facebook can detect them, why let them be displayed in the first place?
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?
That sounds funny, until you realize that there are people who pull ingredients from the waste bin if they still look "good enough". At least one restaurant chain owner in germany was banned from entering his own restaurants after he was caught on camera instructing his staff to do just that, apparently only one instance of a long chain of food safety violations his "frugal" business practices caused.
I suspect there are either employees or contractors getting a cut because even getting a legitimate ad that doesn’t break any rules through review can be an exercise in frustration.
I once spent days getting rejection after rejection for ads for a Christmas light show event at a vineyard (not winery, it was a dry event), on the grounds that I was apparently selling alcohol.
Meanwhile I get ads for black market cigarettes, shrooms, roids, cannabis, and anything else you can imagine.
Yes please I totally agree. Something big must be going on there. I once bought an item through an Instagram ad. For about a month I got fake updates about shipping. Then one day I get an email that itvwas delivered 2 days ago, complete with a different shipping path and an apparently real USPS tracking ID. Of course I received nothing. Complained to PayPal, the complaint was closed within minutes as not valid.
What compelled you to buy something through an ad? Does it often work? My operating assumption is that every click-through internet ad other than major brands (Apple, car makers, etc) is basically a scam.
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Yeah, don't do that. Instagram ads are no different to the WURGLBIXY and HUYTVING and XORMLINAP and other smashed up syllable "brands" on Amazon, except they'll mostly deliver something to you, even if it is shit.
Take any of the images from an Instagram ad. Someone, somewhere, did (probably) build or design the product being sold (a lot come from Kickstarter and may have never launched), but if you search you'll find hundreds or more scams riding on that coattails who will hope to collect and fuck off with your money before IG shuts them down (if they ever do).
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Always baffles me when there's rules that criminals can just get past, at the expense of normal users who are being genuine.
Same on X. It’s possible that the scammers just operate networks of credit cards and domains and rotate as soon as they grt flagged. Numbers game basically. But it’s also possible that the rules are applied differently to advertisers that bring in a lot of cash, regardless of legality.
I don't think it was Jack's fault, but Twitter went from something that (granted they did tend to do a few shady things from a UX perspective) was fine and largely worked but did have a massive censorship problem, to something that works less well (seriously? i can't see posts chronologically without an account? on TWITTER???) and apparently still has censorship (although I was mostly preoccupied with covid, actual doctors getting banned for truthful information, pre-Musk)
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I bought my daughter a shirt I saw in a Facebook ad, from Chalk & Stone. The shirt arrived and is great.
Exactly. Blatant scam ads are reported to no avail, and I see them still multiple times a day.
After reading Careless People, it became much more tangible. "Yes people are motivated by money", but Zuck and others at the top of FB actively make a point of expending significant effort to avoid fixing things. It's not that they don't know, or care, it's that they know and care about keeping the gravy train at full speed while they pat themselves on the back for being masters of the universe, so to speak.
10% of Meta revenue is AI scam ads, Meta gets a cut, so they hide it.
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 think 80% of my Youtube ads are either outright scams or AI generated ads for questionable "as seen on TV" style products.
I remember getting "lend us your google account" ad ON YOUTUBE of all places
It's insane work when you just search "Coinbase" and literally the first or sponsored results are not Coinbase but scam sites. I've seen this first-hand in Google. Obviously SEO and DA isn't on their side so it has to just be like pay enough and you can push whatever you want.
My wife got hit by this. Click an ad for to a 100% fake site with deep discounts, put in her credit card, order never went through. I checked the advertiser and it was somewhere in China. A few days later, her CC was used to buy some gift cards online. At least it was a good learning experience.
Adding to this frustration is a 25yr registered 501(c)3 non-profit I volunteer for that holds an annual art festival. The festival proceeds go to funding educational materials. They've had an active facebook page for at least 15 years, with thousands of followers from around the world.
When the non-profit tried to advertise the art festival on Facebook. Facebook not only denied them, but when the non-profit asked for a review of the denial they were warned if they asked again their entire facebook page would be flagged and deleted.
Facebook is large enough I cannot imagine their reasoning. They very likely have several conflicting streams of logic depending on teams involved. One thing I think is reasonable is that money is a motivational factor for Facebook.
Put simply, organizations who come in immediately spending money on advertising are more likely to be fast tracked. Organizations who don't spent a lot of money are more likely to be shut down. ("you've been a freeloader all this time who will likely not pay sustainably after this one-time payment. We're focusing on sustainable paying customers, goodbye")
Addition: Now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a literal metric of "money/time" ratio. The more money you spend in less time likely improves your chances of being fast-tracked, thus biasing new accounts who immediately spend on advertising over existing ones who sparsely pay.
Having worked in advertiser support: fb pages are basically an unsupported product and their support channels for advertising are farmed out to the lowest bidder.
They do bucket out support into spend tiers, although when I was there it was overall spend, not frequency
Thanks for the insights! That was helpful.
Bro you may have just been socially engineered to give out the internal workings of Facebook from a neo crime lab.
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I deleted my facebook. Its the only thing I can do it seems and I advice everyone to do the same. Screw this platform. Facebook’s scams have caused the elders in my family so much pain and me so much stress dealing with it, its not worth it. A monopolistic cancer on society.
Are people still using Facebook in 2026? I sometimes go back to my Facebook account, it is a complete wasteland, my feed is just generic doomscroll material, nothing new from actual people I know. Communities I follow mostly moved to Discord, it is also no longer where events like festivals post their latest news. Facebook looks like it is #1 on paper, but my experience is completely different, it is nothing like it was 10 years ago, in fact, a significant portion of my Facebook feed is "remember 5-10 years ago".
> Are people still using Facebook in 2026?
Some of the best B2C customers are on FB — willing to spend, low expectations, low maintenance.
If you add IG to the mix, it’s even better.
Your typical HNer does not really fall into “ideal customer” profile for most B2C businesses. Our saving grace is our above average income profile. Other than that, on average we are tolerated rather than sought after (imho).
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Facebook marketplace has completely taken over the used sales business in my area (Pacific Northwest). Craigslist is dead, offer up is dead, FB marketplace won.
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It's become a defacto forum for a lot of local niche stuff like clubs, schools, non profits, and other special interest groups.
In my area there are groups related to a lot of different outdoor activities , and they share information, trip reports, etc. There might be some other forums for that, but they aren't as widely used or frequently updated.
Yes, though it is much reduced.
I might look at my feed* perhaps 2-3 times a week; despite this, there's a good chance only one of my friends has posted anything new. Unfortunately, that particular friend is also a fairly cliché left-of-the-Cuban-Communist-Party (no, seriously) activist and 95% of her posts are "signal boosting" things I, a Brit living in Germany, do not have any connection to, e.g. "Demexit memes" or Bernie Sander's opinions about anything.
Doesn't help that this trillion dollar corporation still can't handle rotation metadata*, so if I see something and I want to share it, even if it's a good fit for my feed, 50% chance the pic looks stupid the moment I've uploaded it, to which I respond "ugh, never mind then" and forget about trying to solve this and don't post it.
* though the messenger app's web view
I just created my account so I can buy/sell gunplas
> Are people still using Facebook in 2026?
I know this is meant as rhetorical snark, but facebook is by far the most popular social network on the planet, so it just sounds silly.
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I purposely don't use mine. They keep shadow profiles on you, if you're in IL you can sue them (there already was a lawsuit about it) and get some money from them.
I completely agree. I did this many years ago. The only thing that annoys me is that for many local things it’s the only option. I’m actually significantly less informed and involved in the local community because things are so heavily reliant on Facebook, and I refuse to sign back up.
I left Facebook over a decade ago, and it was painful to realize how many people simply forgot that I exist, and how many events I missed because many people exclusively use it to invite people.
Similar experience where I met someone in 2017 and was enraptured with them, and we eventually drifted apart because they only communicated through Snapchat and Instagram.
I often wonder if abstaining from the platforms that I dislike was worth the increase in loneliness and detachment from society, but I don't have access to the alternative universe where I decided to grit my teeth and accept the data hoarding companies and dark patterns as a tradeoff for being able to interact with people who couldn't care less about the technicalities.
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What's fun is how many things they lock behind a "fuck you, sign in to read this" popup (and now Instagram too)
This from the same company that conveniently tends to reset privacy settings on posts
(It ought to be possible to access info as a non-user, but you can't, so they force you to sign up)
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Unfortunately this monopolistic cancer has become the only way for businesses to get to their customers.
My first question in 2026. Why does such company is allowed to exist and harm society?
Because companies have only existed for a few hundred years and we still haven't caught up with the idea of making things they do illegal. We tend to pass responsibility to the people who make up the company, rather than the corporation, but the people have gotten pretty good at making it impossible to assign blame to any individual. And you can't cost the owners (shareholders), because of course none of them are at fault, either.
Who at Meta is responsible for posting scam ads? Nobody. But Meta isn't responsible, either. So some executive makes a halfhearted promise to do something about it, but without any accountability.
The "limited liability" was just supposed to be for debts, but it turned out to be good for laundering responsibility, too. Originally, corporations had fixed term charters. And it might be worth looking at that again.
We need to start holding executives accountable for things going on in their companies, and go as far as holding board members, and if its an external company then hold them accountable as well, and their board members. Just go all the way on accountability to the point where it becomes hard to mess around because someone will freak out. I wonder how many "save my skin" whistleblowers we will see at the executive level if everyone at the top of a company can be held liable for stuff like this, that goes on for over a decade. Its pretty obvious Facebook KNOWS there's fraud, but they willfully do nothing, harming consumers everywhere.
What you would see is firms divesting from companies that do this to save their own skins too, so funds would dry up if they don't remediate it.
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Unfortunately the fabric of our society has started unraveling and 2026 is the year where predatory business models and abusive monopolies dominate
Because money.
Because it is based in US.
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.
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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.
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So there's Dieselgate for Meta as there is Dieselgate for Honey
Both are American companies, not like VW, so not much will happen
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Not to mention Uber's little program to detect whether a rider was likely to be law/code enforcement in cities where there were restrictions on Uber operations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838
Not sure why this only seems to happen with IG ads, but I've noticed twice already that i'll purchase something on IG for a fixed price, and it will automatically enroll me into a monthly subscription plan without any chance to cancel it. Further, the subscription can then not be cancelled without email interaction -- no web-based cancellation.
The checkout screen had no mention of a subscription or any cost of a subscription, so not even sure how this is legal.
It has not gotten to the point where I dont make any purchase via IG. I'll independently search for the product and purchase it (usually less expensively via Amazon.com).
Not sure how this is good for IG, because the attribution is then not matched on the purchase. Further, not sure how this is even good for the merchant, since I'll inevitably have to do a chargeback.
How much more scammy and illegal behavior must we tolerate from Meta before anyone thinks of putting that Zuck behind bars?
No one will go to jail. The fee will cost less than they profited. Crime is defective legal, there's just a toll.
Easy solution: Don't patronize Meta.
Nobody can figure this out for some reason
[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838
They made $16 BILLION last year off of them. Screw your parents and grandparents that get scammed out of their life savings, Meta has to make money.
Gavin Belson would never suggest scrubbing negative mentions of Hooli from the internet.
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)
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.
On the other hand, prepaid credit cards seem to be one of the only ways to prevent merchants from "running up" the charges on a customers account. Sure, a customer can go through the dispute process but it's quite a hassle. Just "limiting the amount of money you place on the table" is quite effective. Giving a merchant your credit card with say a $5,000 or more available balance seems like insanity, like laying out 50 of $100 bills on the table: "here, go ahead, can I trust you to take only what you should" ? I would pay extra to have a VISA or MC credit card that only offers say a $200 limit, just for dubious situations, but again, providers have a "conflict of interest" in that they only make their "cut" when the charges go through, so the more and the larger the charges - - the more "cut" they obtain.
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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.
The issue as I see it is that these searches are run when testers look for them, not on a regular basis. If Facebook can detect them, why let them be displayed in the first place?
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?
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That sounds funny, until you realize that there are people who pull ingredients from the waste bin if they still look "good enough". At least one restaurant chain owner in germany was banned from entering his own restaurants after he was caught on camera instructing his staff to do just that, apparently only one instance of a long chain of food safety violations his "frugal" business practices caused.
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