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Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

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Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#31

Post by lordnacho »

I know a guy who does this for a living. What I gathered from talking to him:

- I'm not sure how his ads break the ToS, but something like what this article describes might be part of it.

- Put some non violating ad on for approval, then change it.

- He changes the destination based on whether the viewer is coming from FB's network.

- Use a prepaid card with phony details to pay for the ad.

- Says he is one of FB's largest customers. Readily admits to being a bit shady with his ads, doesn't seem to bother him.

I have no idea whether things have changed much in the past couple of years wrt to how the system works.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#32

Post by madeofpalk »

tehwebguy wrote: post #17
madeofpalk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the case for this is to be robust for the many legitimate ways that online marketers use ads and create landing pages. Often marketing platforms (like Hubspot or whatever) lets you create multiple landing pages which might all be on a subdomain(s) to rather than handing full control of the root domain to the platform. In these cases, you wouldn't want pages.ctvnews.com to appear as the display domain. Also no…

I don't buy it, it's an oversight IMO. Marketers can buy domains if they won't want to display a sub domain, and Facebook can check the final destination landing page. I mean, they already do! Every time you make a new ad they scrape the final destination for meta tags and content.

Same thing still applies - they don't want ctvnewsmarketing.com appearing as the domain.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#33

Post by zeta0134 »

mevile wrote: post #23
GeneralMayhem wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redirecting based on client IP is trivial for anyone with sufficient resources to have put together that ESPN clone in the first place.

Facebook could obviously detect the HTTP redirect.

They can detect that a redirect has happened, but not the logic that determined which destination to display. If a redirect happens no matter what (this is very, very common for advertisement landing pages to track campaign visibility) then the presence of one is not necessarily malicious.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#34

Post by MichaelGG »

FB should really be doing a bit more review when displaying popular websites - flag them for quick further review. For instance, how many legit CNN accounts do they have?

But this seems to be the norm. Google displays highly misleading ads, especially on mobile. I see fake virus scans, "fix battery issues" and other junk. Google's main search ads had malware downloads, even for popular things like Skype. (And Chrome?)

Microsoft's store had many misleading apps, including fake Netflix apps. It took several interactions between MS and Netflix to get that sorted, and MS still ran fake apps (paid!) for popular software and movies. MS wouldn't even deal with ISVs that complained. Hell, the Windows Store even carried a fake version of Windows at one point! They didn't (don't) verify any details, such as publisher name. For a while, typing "Facebook" into the Start Menu brought up a fake FB app. This should put W10's invasiveness into new light: MS is not competent when it comes to this kind of stuff.

I do wonder how much money this stuff brings in. Is it a significant percent of business for these companies? It can't just be simple incompetence -- in MS's case, they sometimes paid for the junk apps.

I'm still sort of surprised that this junk can make enough money for people to advertise it though. Guess even 20 years after the net started getting popular, there's still enough unsavvy people to scam.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#35

Post by heyalexej »

lordnacho wrote: post #31

I know a guy who does this for a living. What I gathered from talking to him: - I'm not sure how his ads break the ToS, but something like what this article describes might be part of it. - Put some non violating ad on for approval, then change it. - He changes the destination based on whether the viewer is coming from FB's network. - Use a prepaid card with phony details to pay for the ad. - Says he is one of FB's l…

It still works the exact same way, except prepaid cards won't take you far at several thousand dollar spend per day per account. Residential IPs are needed and FB accounts with history (hint: have a look at craigslist). Also pre-warming the white hat ads can cost several thousand $. And yes - those can become the biggest spenders on FB.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#37

Post by tdkl »

MichaelGG wrote: post #34

FB should really be doing a bit more review when displaying popular websites - flag them for quick further review. For instance, how many legit CNN accounts do they have? But this seems to be the norm. Google displays highly misleading ads, especially on mobile. I see fake virus scans, "fix battery issues" and other junk. Google's main search ads had malware downloads, even for popular things like Skype. (And Chrome?…

In Microsoft's case they just wanted more apps to flaunt at the next event to display how their Store is growing now.

Same shit as forcing upgrades with dark patterns and silently changing things so Windows 10 can be a success on powerpoint slides.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#38

Post by mrweasel »

radicalbyte wrote: post #27
madeofpalk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the case for this is to be robust for the many legitimate ways that online marketers use ads and create landing pages. Often marketing platforms (like Hubspot or whatever) lets you create multiple landing pages which might all be on a subdomain(s) to rather than handing full control of the root domain to the platform. In these cases, you wouldn't want pages.ctvnews.com to appear as the display domain. Also no…

I think you're right. It looks like Facebook host a lot of ads themselves, so I guess that advertisers use URL shorteners as a way to verify click throughs from Facebook. For unsophisticated advertisers (i.e. with no referrer log analysis) I guess it's pretty easy and effective.

>For unsophisticated advertisers (i.e. with no referrer log analysis)

In that case most advertisers are unsophisticated. Even the biggest ad-networks/retargeting/tracking solutions all depend on redirect via their servers to their end customer.

I am constantly disappointed with the technical knowledge and understanding display by our advertising partners. A large number of them have almost zero understand of how the internet work. Of cause part of the problem is that as a developer you're inclined to point out that something won't work because it won't work 100% of the time. That a useless answer for the advertising department and you end up with duct taped solution that works well enough, but of cause create their own set of problems.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#39

Post by greenspot »

tl;dr:

Facebook ad's can have different display-URLs and target-URLs, even the domain can be different, e.g. ad shows cnn.com but leads to myshadysite.com

+ some subtle promotion for Hunchly (full-text search for your browser history)

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#40

Post by mrweasel »

shivsta wrote: post #20
Lxr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is already getting their own data from clicks, why support competitors' data-gathering services?

If they don't support it, advertisers won't use the platform

Correct. While we do use Facebooks tracking for ads placed on Facebook, traffic from all other source is piped through a partner that does referral tracking and ensure that we aren't paying out commission to more than one referrer per sale. I easily imaging someone wanting to funnelling everything through one advertising/tracking partner for simplicity.

Facebook needs to ensure that their setup works in a way that the rest of the business expects. What Facebook seems to lack is the resources and dedication of Google to find the fraudulent ads.

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