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.
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jacobgold
Someone who has spent $100M+ on Google Ads explained to me that Google is doing everything possible to juice their revenue right now, in ways they've never seen before.
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.
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Telaneo
We need strict liability on this front. Google is complicit. No newspaper or equivalent publication in the days before web ads would allow ads that are down at the level of scam that seemingly make up the modus operandi of Google today (and even the ads back then that did bend the truth a bit, overpromised, or showed products that didn't actually have any legitimate use, shouldn't really have been legal back then either. They just weren't big enough of a problem to worry about).
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HomeDeLaPot
Every YouTube ad I see now is an AI-generated scam ad hawking everything from free electricity to anti-aging products to birdhouses hand-carved by an AI-generated senior citizen. I've seen some multiple times, days or weeks apart. Their advertising standards are a complete joke.
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CqtGLRGcukpy
I have two guesses why Google does this:
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)
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beloch
This is one major reason why blocking ads is now a safety issue. If you have a family member who, for whatever reason, might be fooled by this sort of ad, install an effective adblocker on all their browsers and uninstall/disable browsers that don't support an effective adblocker.
If you are reliant on ad revenue, you should be expressing your displeasure to google right now.
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snailmailman
Google can reply and confirm whether or not a report did anything?
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
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cube00
It's interesting that in the beginning Google would prominently display "Ads by Google" [1] which they've since hidden behind the "info" icon because they don't want their name associated with these scam ads.
Because serving dodgy ads pays them a lot of money. The pivot is complete.
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.
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gdulli
A lot of questions being raised today can be answered by the recently inverted power balance between users/customers and corporations. People have not yet internalized that old assumptions about how corporations fear losing customers are no longer valid. Consumers have become entirely docile and passive. Open hostility to consumers is now a norm. (Obviously regulation is also less powerful and less feared as well.)
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erros
Money. They make so much money from malvertisement that it doesn't make sense to remediate them. It's corporate greed and they've known about this since the 2010s, various campaigns have sprung up and have caused untold X amount of dollars in damages in breaches, and nothing changes. I've heard at least one FBI agent who had investigated cases related to malvertisement put Google up there with some of the worst ad networks.
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vannevar
I assume it is the same reason Facebook serves dodgy ads: it makes them money and they have had no liability for the material they choose to serve to users. There are a handful of types of content that could generate bad press (some sexual or racist content, for example), so they police those. But ordinary scams generate engagement and make them money, and since they are generally immune from liability for content under Section 230, there's no downside for them. I've always thought there might be an end-run around Section 230 where the algorithm is tuned to preferentially present fraudulent content, thereby implicating the company in the advertiser's fraud. But as far as I know, no one has tested that approach.
radium3d
Not just dodgy but downright malware links. It's insane. had one with a full screen mcafee level scam. Dropping the ball Google.
celestialcheese
We had to hire a full time person to monitor and block click-trick "Continue" / "Download" scam ads on Google Ad Manager. With the amount of human training we did blocking these ads, google could absolutely solve this problem instantly. The ad creatives are nearly identical. We were seeing new ad accounts targeting our specific domain daily (ad account names like {sitename}339, {sitename}340, etc)
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.
collabs
My opinion is that someone somewhere is paying for those ads and Google needs to get positive identification of a human being for any ad. Google has a near monopoly so there is no reason Google can't force this requirement arbitrarily. Once you have positive identification, suspend them pending further investigation if they serve any dodgy ad. I will be genuinely surprised if Google makes any money off of these dodgy ads. How? Like how does this money flow? Where does it come from?
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?
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stillpointlab
I don't think it is fair to pin this on Google - I get the worst ads on X. But something about how the X ad network works means that even when I report the ad, block the ad poster, etc. there is this army of alternate ad accounts that all show the same ad.
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.
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leoc
As usual, "Google" here means the two individual human beings who together have a controlling interest in Google, Page and Brin. It may also mean some other people, but it certainly means them. To be clear, that's not to suggest that everything dubious about Google can be put on their shoulders. Some Google issues are genuinely hard to solve; some are deep enough in the weeds that they may plausibly never have heard of them or not have time for them. AdSense being a sewer doesn't seem to be one of those.
ricardobeat
There is a well known problem in the Netherlands where scammers will set up fake museum websites, like “vangoghtickets.co”. They don’t even collect the money - your card details are instantly stolen and used for some odd looking purchases in south east asia or something.
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.
andynrkri
My father saw a similar ad and got worried. The ad said you need to update your pdf version immediately. He uninstalled the YouTube because he knew it was irregular and thought his phone was hacked.
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thewhitetulip
Funny how AI is AGI and yet ad companies don't use AI to scan for scam ads but they might lock you out of your account via automated review
bashtoni
Don't be evil -> What does "evil" really mean, anyway? -> Judgements about good and evil don't belong in business -> Evil is pretty profitable, actually
VinnyBarreca
Facebook too. There are so many scams being promoted on FB, which is strange because both Facebook and Google ads used to be really strict about what they approved.
Now, it seems like they just approve anything.
dpkirchner
I think the obvious answer is they aren't held to account by regulators. If a few execs were sent to prison for defrauding their users (and investors for taking on so much risk) things would change overnight.
hn_submit
These days almost all Google search results return nothing but links to stuff that you can buy instead of useful information you were looking for. They do this because they think they can get away with it, they're the only game in town.
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!
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cwillu
Google itself serves similar ads for its own services in all its properties. I've been “critically low” on google storage space for several years now, and every google app prompts and notifies and nags about it on every launch.
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karim79
I think the answer is, that's always been Google's business and not much has really changed. Advertising accounts for about 78% of their total revenue.
flerchin
They don't have liability for dodgy ads, but they are paid to run them. POSIWID.
maitola
Because that’s how they make money. Same reason Meta doesn’t flag fake news/information and actually even amplifies and serves it in echo chambers. It’s a business model. They do it because they can. No one is stopping them. Why would they leave the money on the table?
ArcHound
Man, Google is catching strays from all directions. I recently posted an article about their bot behaviour [0], only to be drowned in other more pressing issues.
To comment on this one: as long as there is no backlash from their real customers (those that buy ads) nothing will change.
I have a website with some adsense ads (that pay for the server).
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.
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kentonv
Here's another one for you. If you search for any popular book on Google Play Books, you get a whole bunch of fake knock-offs alongside the real book. Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to tell which one is real.
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:
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?)
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rinconrex
Well, as others have said money. As far as I know ads are the domain of the FTC and FCC. Who's going to stop them from serving scammy ads? Not Carr, not the FTC commissioners.
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.
corranh
This one is not complicated…Because dodgy companies spend a lot of money on ads.
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slopblast
Google's abandoning of 'do no evil' has hastened their becoming dodgy themselves, not just the ads they serve up, but the way they serve you and your data up.
drchaim
I’d love to know how much Google has made from accidental clicks since it started. I used to see my mum make a couple of mistaken clicks here and there on her computer; now on mobile it’s easily 10x worse. Sometimes because she doesn’t realize they’re ads, other times she tries to tap the X and it opens… It’s insane
MiroslavPokorny
Because they get paid ?
didip
Spam/Scam filtering should have been the perfect place to show case SOTA AI. Why Google & Meta have not been able to do so?
Relatedly, DMCA should be expanded to harmful ads content.
wwind123
My understanding is, it's a multi-party cat-and-mouse game that never stops evolving.
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.
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LeoPanthera
Apple News does this too. In some ways it's actually worse. It's a real problem, and those who are less technologically ept are inevitably going to be scammed. I expect a lot more from Apple than I do from Google, so it's surprising that it's been going on for so long.
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NKosmatos
LOL because they're greedy and they want the maximum profits for their shareholders and the board.
The same explanation applies to every big (greedy) corporation :-(
Have you seen what is happeing with Facebook marketplace? with Twitter ads? (no, it's not called X, it's still Twitter for some of us) have you seen apps on Play store and Apple?
All soulless, big, greedy companies do this and they don't care about us anymore :-(
ezoe
Because nobody is prosecuted for scam and malicious ads.
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.
calny
I was irritated by this exact same misleading ad a few weeks ago and tweeted about it into the void. Kudos for the author for trying to do something about it.
torginus
Do platform holders have a say in this?
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.
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rhaff
My father installed an adware through one of the google ads. Just straight out of nowhere displays fullscreen ads whatever you're doing.
BLKNSLVR
Based on prior FBI recommendations to use ad blockers to keep yourself safe from scams[0], it seems that the various methods of blocking/avoiding Youtube ads should also be recommended. Use as many of the tools as possible to escape the suck of the scam-hole that Google has made the Internet:
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.
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?
dotcoma
Because they are a dodgy company?
driverdan
Until they are held legally liable they will do the minimum necessary to keep the money flowing and avoid litigation.
CM30
Frankly speaking, because no-one is forcing them to stop serving them.
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...
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kazinator
Extension to Hanlon's: never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to apathy and greed.
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jrm4
This strikes me as a very silly question?
Because they can. There's no meaningful way to prevent them from doing so.
mococa
Gezus… If you see my mother-in-law cellphone. It is impossible to use <period>. Full of ads crap that she probably installed by following ads… Remember IE toolbars?
Marol
Cloaking.
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.
codingjoe
Same with Meta. The latter knowingly makes a substantial revenue from those ads. Unless a government steps it to make advertising platforms liable, there will be zero incentive for change
Waterluvian
I don’t think they want to nor is it good for them to long term. But I bet they’re institutionally incapable of avoiding it given the KPIs that drive the entire employment ambitions of many managers.
mike_bob
No surprise under a republican controlled government, the FCC considers this type of behavior "good for business".
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rectang
Ohhh, has anybody used AI to generate delicious statistics about how many ads served by various ad networks will get you hacked / violate the ad networks own policies?
I've seen suspiciously more malicious ads on older users phone (e.g., click to update Chrome ads) especially in-app ads.
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razorbeamz
Simple: They don't care.
gdevenyi
People still see ads?
eranation
This is include ads that impersonate google services, e.g. "your google translate has expired, upgrade to a new version". Reporting it to google is like yelling at a wall. Or worse, yelling at a wall after a few million years will slowly erode it due to the air friction.
tcfhgj
Still some people don't block ads and people pay for it.
Simple as that.
tomxor
> 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.
qsbuilder
its so terrible because most of those ads pray on seniors, I swear i see the Tai Chi ad every single day and reported it so many times.
saaaaaam
How weird. I reported this exact ad earlier today.
maxlin
Because they get paid and can always wait before banning them without fingers pointing at them too hard.
alpineman
Same for Facebook posts and comments inciting hatred
HarHarVeryFunny
Google's ad-serving is dumb as a rock. It seems to be based just on things it thinks you may be interested in, even when it should be 100% obvious that they are not things you are going to buy.
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.
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muyuu
They have always been spivs. Their entire business model is dishonest and predatory.
jeffybefffy519
Money is the answer
paulsutter
The answer is in Google's Capex trends:
2023: $32B
2025: $91B
2027: $300B (projected)
2029: $400B (projected)
“I’m happy to go bankrupt rather than lose this race” -Larry Page
pschastain
Money
einpoklum
> 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:
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.
anonym29
I suspect this boils down to a cost/benefit tradeoff.
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.
donkeylazy456
kidnapping ads, scrolling dark patterns, nsfw context ads, fake medicines...
i would prefer paywall instead.
gherkinnn
> 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.
qwerty_clicks
Keep up these efforts to name and shame. If Google won’t act on these things because it doesn’t make them money, because they are unregulated, or because they are lazy, they might because it still cuts their credibility and reputation. Especially here on HN where Google is no longer considered such a darling by developers and thinkers.
ambione
google once served me an ad for what I'm pretty sure was CP, and i never reported it to anyone out of fear that just by being served a link to that kind of horrible shit I was somehow going to get in trouble over it. Sounds ridiculous, but as a nobody, pissing off a giga-corporation in an era owned by them probably was the better choice for my financial and overall well-being, even if it felt cowardly. Besides, epstein's guests roam free, unimpeded, and continue with impunity, what positive outcome could I have possibly hoped for?
diogenescynic
I previously noted that the top search result for Claude Code was linking to a spyware website. It's crazy how this stuff is not monitored at all.
OtomotO
Because they make money by that.
Sometimes simple answers are not only elegant, but capture the essence of a problem.
shevy-java
> 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.
algoth1
Money
boredatoms
Google gave up, they know they’ve lost Search to ChatGPT
colordrops
Because google is dodgy.
Pxtl
Why not?
It's not like they face any consequences for being party to fraud. Laws are for poor people.
gagan2020
To Google,
Don't be Evil
geekamongus
This type of shit is why I refuse to give up my pi-hole, uBlock, and Firefox.
tonyhart7
"Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?"
more like why company still want to receive money ????? is more correct term
demibabs
> 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?”
hnbad
Google (Alphabet) is a corporation. Corporations follow the profit motive. Furthermore it's a publicly traded corporation. These follow the interests of their shareholders.
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.
hsuduebc2
It simply increases shareholder value more than if they we're removed. It will only ends when companies will be made at least partially responsible for damages they help to facilitate. Don't be evil my ass.
expedition32
Not just dodgy some are straight up illegal.
They'll act if someone threatens to sue otherwise Google doesn't give a shit as long as they get paid.
krttherealest
yall better ba carefull with that ads and shi
mito88
a rhetorical question...
:)
kylepomykala
"Don't be evil."
riazrizvi
Because money?
Ask me another.
gverrilla
Mere consequences of the "free market". Applying the so-called "Hanlon's razor" to one of the most malicious actors in the planet is borderline delusional (or malicious :P ).
Razengan
Has anyone ever actually even purchased anything just because of an ad?
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.
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michael_j_x
imagine if a TV network served scammy ads during prime-time TV.
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nullc
Youtube's bitcoin doubler scams are a great example of this... they run essentially the same videos over and over again, usually Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, or Steve Wozniak, occasionally Warren Buffet and a few others-- with some ticker or scroll telling people about a special promotion where whatever bitcoin you send them will be sent back doubled.
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.
fHr
because they're greedy capitalist mfs making a lot of money of scams
mschuster91
Google doesn't care because they figured out no one will hold them accountable any more.
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.
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ChaoStatiX
I believe Google already has systems in place to block malicious ads and is actively running them. In fact, according to last year's 'Ads Safety Report 2025,' Google blocked over 8.3 billion bad ads in a single year. Of course, despite these efforts, the sheer volume of ads being uploaded makes it practically impossible to catch every single one of them. Therefore, rather than simply criticizing the issue in a negative light, we should recognize and appreciate the platform's ongoing efforts to clean up its ecosystem.
Adsense has been a nightmare for us.
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.
Someone who has spent $100M+ on Google Ads explained to me that Google is doing everything possible to juice their revenue right now, in ways they've never seen before.
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.
We need strict liability on this front. Google is complicit. No newspaper or equivalent publication in the days before web ads would allow ads that are down at the level of scam that seemingly make up the modus operandi of Google today (and even the ads back then that did bend the truth a bit, overpromised, or showed products that didn't actually have any legitimate use, shouldn't really have been legal back then either. They just weren't big enough of a problem to worry about).
Every YouTube ad I see now is an AI-generated scam ad hawking everything from free electricity to anti-aging products to birdhouses hand-carved by an AI-generated senior citizen. I've seen some multiple times, days or weeks apart. Their advertising standards are a complete joke.
I have two guesses why Google does this:
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)
This is one major reason why blocking ads is now a safety issue. If you have a family member who, for whatever reason, might be fooled by this sort of ad, install an effective adblocker on all their browsers and uninstall/disable browsers that don't support an effective adblocker.
If you are reliant on ad revenue, you should be expressing your displeasure to google right now.
Google can reply and confirm whether or not a report did anything?
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
It's interesting that in the beginning Google would prominently display "Ads by Google" [1] which they've since hidden behind the "info" icon because they don't want their name associated with these scam ads.
[1]: https://malcontentcomics.com/systemsboy/2009/09/the-google-a...
Because serving dodgy ads pays them a lot of money. The pivot is complete.
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.
A lot of questions being raised today can be answered by the recently inverted power balance between users/customers and corporations. People have not yet internalized that old assumptions about how corporations fear losing customers are no longer valid. Consumers have become entirely docile and passive. Open hostility to consumers is now a norm. (Obviously regulation is also less powerful and less feared as well.)
Money. They make so much money from malvertisement that it doesn't make sense to remediate them. It's corporate greed and they've known about this since the 2010s, various campaigns have sprung up and have caused untold X amount of dollars in damages in breaches, and nothing changes. I've heard at least one FBI agent who had investigated cases related to malvertisement put Google up there with some of the worst ad networks.
I assume it is the same reason Facebook serves dodgy ads: it makes them money and they have had no liability for the material they choose to serve to users. There are a handful of types of content that could generate bad press (some sexual or racist content, for example), so they police those. But ordinary scams generate engagement and make them money, and since they are generally immune from liability for content under Section 230, there's no downside for them. I've always thought there might be an end-run around Section 230 where the algorithm is tuned to preferentially present fraudulent content, thereby implicating the company in the advertiser's fraud. But as far as I know, no one has tested that approach.
Not just dodgy but downright malware links. It's insane. had one with a full screen mcafee level scam. Dropping the ball Google.
We had to hire a full time person to monitor and block click-trick "Continue" / "Download" scam ads on Google Ad Manager. With the amount of human training we did blocking these ads, google could absolutely solve this problem instantly. The ad creatives are nearly identical. We were seeing new ad accounts targeting our specific domain daily (ad account names like {sitename}339, {sitename}340, etc)
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.
My opinion is that someone somewhere is paying for those ads and Google needs to get positive identification of a human being for any ad. Google has a near monopoly so there is no reason Google can't force this requirement arbitrarily. Once you have positive identification, suspend them pending further investigation if they serve any dodgy ad. I will be genuinely surprised if Google makes any money off of these dodgy ads. How? Like how does this money flow? Where does it come from?
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?
I don't think it is fair to pin this on Google - I get the worst ads on X. But something about how the X ad network works means that even when I report the ad, block the ad poster, etc. there is this army of alternate ad accounts that all show the same ad.
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.
As usual, "Google" here means the two individual human beings who together have a controlling interest in Google, Page and Brin. It may also mean some other people, but it certainly means them. To be clear, that's not to suggest that everything dubious about Google can be put on their shoulders. Some Google issues are genuinely hard to solve; some are deep enough in the weeds that they may plausibly never have heard of them or not have time for them. AdSense being a sewer doesn't seem to be one of those.
There is a well known problem in the Netherlands where scammers will set up fake museum websites, like “vangoghtickets.co”. They don’t even collect the money - your card details are instantly stolen and used for some odd looking purchases in south east asia or something.
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.
My father saw a similar ad and got worried. The ad said you need to update your pdf version immediately. He uninstalled the YouTube because he knew it was irregular and thought his phone was hacked.
Funny how AI is AGI and yet ad companies don't use AI to scan for scam ads but they might lock you out of your account via automated review
Don't be evil -> What does "evil" really mean, anyway? -> Judgements about good and evil don't belong in business -> Evil is pretty profitable, actually
Facebook too. There are so many scams being promoted on FB, which is strange because both Facebook and Google ads used to be really strict about what they approved.
Now, it seems like they just approve anything.
I think the obvious answer is they aren't held to account by regulators. If a few execs were sent to prison for defrauding their users (and investors for taking on so much risk) things would change overnight.
These days almost all Google search results return nothing but links to stuff that you can buy instead of useful information you were looking for. They do this because they think they can get away with it, they're the only game in town.
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!
Google itself serves similar ads for its own services in all its properties. I've been “critically low” on google storage space for several years now, and every google app prompts and notifies and nags about it on every launch.
I think the answer is, that's always been Google's business and not much has really changed. Advertising accounts for about 78% of their total revenue.
They don't have liability for dodgy ads, but they are paid to run them. POSIWID.
Because that’s how they make money. Same reason Meta doesn’t flag fake news/information and actually even amplifies and serves it in echo chambers. It’s a business model. They do it because they can. No one is stopping them. Why would they leave the money on the table?
Man, Google is catching strays from all directions. I recently posted an article about their bot behaviour [0], only to be drowned in other more pressing issues.
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/
I have a website with some adsense ads (that pay for the server).
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.
Here's another one for you. If you search for any popular book on Google Play Books, you get a whole bunch of fake knock-offs alongside the real book. Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to tell which one is real.
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?)
Well, as others have said money. As far as I know ads are the domain of the FTC and FCC. Who's going to stop them from serving scammy ads? Not Carr, not the FTC commissioners.
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.
This one is not complicated…Because dodgy companies spend a lot of money on ads.
Google's abandoning of 'do no evil' has hastened their becoming dodgy themselves, not just the ads they serve up, but the way they serve you and your data up.
I’d love to know how much Google has made from accidental clicks since it started. I used to see my mum make a couple of mistaken clicks here and there on her computer; now on mobile it’s easily 10x worse. Sometimes because she doesn’t realize they’re ads, other times she tries to tap the X and it opens… It’s insane
Because they get paid ?
Spam/Scam filtering should have been the perfect place to show case SOTA AI. Why Google & Meta have not been able to do so?
Relatedly, DMCA should be expanded to harmful ads content.
My understanding is, it's a multi-party cat-and-mouse game that never stops evolving.
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.
Apple News does this too. In some ways it's actually worse. It's a real problem, and those who are less technologically ept are inevitably going to be scammed. I expect a lot more from Apple than I do from Google, so it's surprising that it's been going on for so long.
LOL because they're greedy and they want the maximum profits for their shareholders and the board. The same explanation applies to every big (greedy) corporation :-( Have you seen what is happeing with Facebook marketplace? with Twitter ads? (no, it's not called X, it's still Twitter for some of us) have you seen apps on Play store and Apple? All soulless, big, greedy companies do this and they don't care about us anymore :-(
Because nobody is prosecuted for scam and malicious ads.
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.
I was irritated by this exact same misleading ad a few weeks ago and tweeted about it into the void. Kudos for the author for trying to do something about it.
Do platform holders have a say in this?
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.
My father installed an adware through one of the google ads. Just straight out of nowhere displays fullscreen ads whatever you're doing.
Based on prior FBI recommendations to use ad blockers to keep yourself safe from scams[0], it seems that the various methods of blocking/avoiding Youtube ads should also be recommended. Use as many of the tools as possible to escape the suck of the scam-hole that Google has made the Internet:
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?
Because they are a dodgy company?
Until they are held legally liable they will do the minimum necessary to keep the money flowing and avoid litigation.
Frankly speaking, because no-one is forcing them to stop serving them.
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...
Extension to Hanlon's: never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to apathy and greed.
This strikes me as a very silly question?
Because they can. There's no meaningful way to prevent them from doing so.
Gezus… If you see my mother-in-law cellphone. It is impossible to use <period>. Full of ads crap that she probably installed by following ads… Remember IE toolbars?
Cloaking.
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.
Same with Meta. The latter knowingly makes a substantial revenue from those ads. Unless a government steps it to make advertising platforms liable, there will be zero incentive for change
I don’t think they want to nor is it good for them to long term. But I bet they’re institutionally incapable of avoiding it given the KPIs that drive the entire employment ambitions of many managers.
No surprise under a republican controlled government, the FCC considers this type of behavior "good for business".
Ohhh, has anybody used AI to generate delicious statistics about how many ads served by various ad networks will get you hacked / violate the ad networks own policies?
This is one reason why you have adblock...
Meta knowingly earns 10% of its _overall_ sales from scams. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10...
I've seen suspiciously more malicious ads on older users phone (e.g., click to update Chrome ads) especially in-app ads.
Simple: They don't care.
People still see ads?
This is include ads that impersonate google services, e.g. "your google translate has expired, upgrade to a new version". Reporting it to google is like yelling at a wall. Or worse, yelling at a wall after a few million years will slowly erode it due to the air friction.
Still some people don't block ads and people pay for it.
Simple as that.
> 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.
its so terrible because most of those ads pray on seniors, I swear i see the Tai Chi ad every single day and reported it so many times.
How weird. I reported this exact ad earlier today.
Because they get paid and can always wait before banning them without fingers pointing at them too hard.
Same for Facebook posts and comments inciting hatred
Google's ad-serving is dumb as a rock. It seems to be based just on things it thinks you may be interested in, even when it should be 100% obvious that they are not things you are going to buy.
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.
They have always been spivs. Their entire business model is dishonest and predatory.
Money is the answer
The answer is in Google's Capex trends:
2023: $32B
2025: $91B
2027: $300B (projected)
2029: $400B (projected)
“I’m happy to go bankrupt rather than lose this race” -Larry Page
Money
> 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.
Sigh.
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.
I suspect this boils down to a cost/benefit tradeoff.
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.
kidnapping ads, scrolling dark patterns, nsfw context ads, fake medicines... i would prefer paywall instead.
> 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.
Keep up these efforts to name and shame. If Google won’t act on these things because it doesn’t make them money, because they are unregulated, or because they are lazy, they might because it still cuts their credibility and reputation. Especially here on HN where Google is no longer considered such a darling by developers and thinkers.
google once served me an ad for what I'm pretty sure was CP, and i never reported it to anyone out of fear that just by being served a link to that kind of horrible shit I was somehow going to get in trouble over it. Sounds ridiculous, but as a nobody, pissing off a giga-corporation in an era owned by them probably was the better choice for my financial and overall well-being, even if it felt cowardly. Besides, epstein's guests roam free, unimpeded, and continue with impunity, what positive outcome could I have possibly hoped for?
I previously noted that the top search result for Claude Code was linking to a spyware website. It's crazy how this stuff is not monitored at all.
Because they make money by that.
Sometimes simple answers are not only elegant, but capture the essence of a problem.
> 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.
Money
Google gave up, they know they’ve lost Search to ChatGPT
Because google is dodgy.
Why not?
It's not like they face any consequences for being party to fraud. Laws are for poor people.
To Google,
Don't be Evil
This type of shit is why I refuse to give up my pi-hole, uBlock, and Firefox.
"Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?"
more like why company still want to receive money ????? is more correct term
> 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?”
Google (Alphabet) is a corporation. Corporations follow the profit motive. Furthermore it's a publicly traded corporation. These follow the interests of their shareholders.
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.
It simply increases shareholder value more than if they we're removed. It will only ends when companies will be made at least partially responsible for damages they help to facilitate. Don't be evil my ass.
Not just dodgy some are straight up illegal.
They'll act if someone threatens to sue otherwise Google doesn't give a shit as long as they get paid.
yall better ba carefull with that ads and shi
a rhetorical question...
:)
"Don't be evil."
Because money?
Ask me another.
Mere consequences of the "free market". Applying the so-called "Hanlon's razor" to one of the most malicious actors in the planet is borderline delusional (or malicious :P ).
Has anyone ever actually even purchased anything just because of an ad?
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.
imagine if a TV network served scammy ads during prime-time TV.
Youtube's bitcoin doubler scams are a great example of this... they run essentially the same videos over and over again, usually Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, or Steve Wozniak, occasionally Warren Buffet and a few others-- with some ticker or scroll telling people about a special promotion where whatever bitcoin you send them will be sent back doubled.
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.
because they're greedy capitalist mfs making a lot of money of scams
Google doesn't care because they figured out no one will hold them accountable any more.
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.
I believe Google already has systems in place to block malicious ads and is actively running them. In fact, according to last year's 'Ads Safety Report 2025,' Google blocked over 8.3 billion bad ads in a single year. Of course, despite these efforts, the sheer volume of ads being uploaded makes it practically impossible to catch every single one of them. Therefore, rather than simply criticizing the issue in a negative light, we should recognize and appreciate the platform's ongoing efforts to clean up its ecosystem.