Comment by ModernTimes
20 hours ago
None of this would work if Google Adsense didn't allow scam ads on their system. But they do, millions every day (I deal with this every day on my websites, Google don't care).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
Cloudflare is no better, maybe worse. They forward your complaint & PI on to the offending site's registered owner and to whichever (gray or black hat) host it's served from. In my experience, there is nothing you can do to convince Cloudflare to do anything other than be a middleman for the complaint, yet they offer a layer of protection for the nefarious activities.
Even when I've been able to track down hosts, registrars, etc for scraped duplicates of sites, and report to all and Google, Microsoft Safety Scanner, etc -- nobody acts (or certainly not in any reasonable enough time to be useful).
In one case the scammer was using our own logo served directly from a source we could replace with Cloudflare rewrites. So the hijacked logo became "THIS IS A SCAM SITE" while we replaced the one on production.
> nobody acts
I act. I receive about 5 takedown notices every day--the curse of running an open source DNS service (nip.io/sslip.io).
I've received over 1,000 takedown requests, but none came from Cloudflare or Google. Most of them come from Netcraft, Phishlabs, and doppel.com.
This is interesting… Could you elaborate?
Are you getting takedown requests from people who don’t understand how DNS works, or… are they actually suggesting that your particular DNS server filter particular results?
1 reply →
> Cloudflare is no better, maybe worse. They forward your complaint & PI on to the offending site's registered owner and to whichever (gray or black hat) host it's served from.
This is literally false. They are one of the few hosts I have dealt with that actually does NOT do this. Their abuse reporting form even has check boxes that are optional to forward it to the underlying host and the owner. If you leave them unchecked they don't forward anything.
I don't know where you got your information from but it's quite literally the opposite of reality.
Now, whether or not they actually act on it depends on whether they are proxying the site or merely providing authoritative DNS. If they are just providing DNS they will continue to provide it and deny your report and I think that's stupid and frustrating. If they are proxying it they will put up a block page in front of it which is meh.
A large company's report system is designed to distract you from complaint paths that work and are expensive for the company to deal with (lawsuits) and make you complain to /dev/null instead.
i gave up reporting scams to meta and google, you get the distinct impression they are in on it when you get a response saying “we looked into it and it was fine”
Report them to the FTC and your attorney general.
Your state's attorney general's office, yes, definitely - many have a consumer protection division or whatever.
I'd have trouble believing that U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche would care very much, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to try.
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Try and upvote your own YouTube video and they’ll be on you like a ton of bricks.
Upload a scam ad? No problemo.
They should be held liable, in the same way as brick and mortar stores are liable if they sell you shoddy goods, and the manufacturer can’t be found after your house burns down or whatever.