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Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

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Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#81

Post by willholloway »

stevoski wrote: post #55

When Google got into advertising, they were relaxed about what ads they accepted. They happily ran just about any advert. But then two things happened. 1) the scammers came. 2) governments started holding Google accountable for running ads for online gambling and prescription medication. Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) had to pay large fines for running ads for products and companies that governments saw as illegal.…

I have a lot of experience with the Facebook ad approval process from a stint running affiliate ads on the platform many years ago.

I was able to discover an oddity in the approval process, that created an arbitrage opportunity for me that was quite lucrative in the online dating space.

This was very nice since I had just finished college in 2008 and the global economy and job market stood in ruins all around me, and I really, really didn't want to get a 9-5 job.

My efforts were very tame (and within Facebook guidelines) compared to what other affiliates engaged in. At one end were cloaking scripts based on geolocation. Facebook ad reviewers were sent to one landing page, and visitors to another shadier and more profitable one.

But even more egregious, an affiliate acquaintance I met once bribed a Facebook employee, who set his account to autoapprove any ad he wanted. He used this to advertise Google Is Hiring: Work from Home credit card rebill offers. He told me he made $80,000 in the four days it took Facebook to discover it.

It was a cat and mouse game between Facebook and the affiliates in those days. This was after a short period where Facebook itself allowed these credit card rebills to be advertised on the site.

Affiliate marketing was a nice cash infusion for me at the time, but I am glad to have walked away from what is really the bottom of the barrel in the internet marketing world.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#82

Post by kyledrake »

I've been seeing an uptick in the number of spam relays coming from Facebook attempting to use Neocities for the landing page (or often times a redirect to a landing page elsewhere). We shut the sites down very quickly and the scammer finds a slower and less responsible service eventually. Still, Facebook needs to take better action here to deal with spammers and it's definitely gotten worse lately. They have a ton of money, no excuses here.

Perhaps we can also do an education campaign so that people don't think buying dick pills from scrambled domain names is a good idea. A Youtube video ad starring Ron Jeremy with the motto "Size Doesn't Matter".

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#84

Post by wslh »

stevoski wrote: post #55

When Google got into advertising, they were relaxed about what ads they accepted. They happily ran just about any advert. But then two things happened. 1) the scammers came. 2) governments started holding Google accountable for running ads for online gambling and prescription medication. Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) had to pay large fines for running ads for products and companies that governments saw as illegal.…

Regarding Google AdWords, the scrutiny depends on your size. I am seeing a lot of ad scams in big companies. For example, looking for fiber optic Internet on an ISP without the offering and ending up on a fake landing page. Example (in Spanish): http://suscripcion.fibertel.com.ar/Servicio-Fibertel-12Megas... (from the query fibertel fibra optica)

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#86

Post by mthoms »

ethanbond wrote: post #52
Lxr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly this is likely the truth. Advertising is a unique business model that relies on thinking up increasingly creative ways of tricking users. When linkbait no longer works, lie about the source.

"Unique?" Bait and switch scams have existed since the dawn of time.

And all the scams revolve around pitching something that they aren't. Which is to say they require misleading "advertising" (or more generally - marketing).

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#87

Post by mthoms »

I recently got an ad from the same vendor that lead to the same landing page. Only the ad caption had to do with Sylvester Stallone "revealing his dark secret" in my case. I never click these things but the "cnn.com" part fooled me.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#88

Post by ChuckMcM »

ptaipale wrote: post #26
ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

Pretty egregious. I hope facebook wakes up to this type of fraud quickly because it is the kind of stuff my relatives fall for all the time.

A hope in vain: they most certainly have noticed, and they most certainly know that they profit.

Actually having been at Google and later at a search engine dealing with people trying to do these sorts of games, the FTC in particular is pretty active in this space as are the various states attorney generals. And there are liability issues which have been litigated several times, the biggest one I know of being the Canadian Pharmacy ads on Google, where fines are paid and the user experience is damaged.

So I am pretty confident that they don't allow this stuff on purpose just for profits. I can believe they are slowly walking up the learning curve of how they can be defrauded, and it is slow. You have to train a lot of people. But it gets better. Now if I were in a leadership position in Facebook's advertising group this would be on my list of top priorities to get done.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#89

Post by the_watcher »

AJ007 wrote: post #68
stevoski wrote: post #55

When Google got into advertising, they were relaxed about what ads they accepted. They happily ran just about any advert. But then two things happened. 1) the scammers came. 2) governments started holding Google accountable for running ads for online gambling and prescription medication. Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) had to pay large fines for running ads for products and companies that governments saw as illegal.…

Facebook's ad platform is very mature, it was launched in 2007. I think Facebook is able to let more questionable stuff run in part because the micro-targeting makes it easy to disperse bad stuff to narrowly targeted audiences. On Google, investigators could search well known pharmaceutical terms and it was plain as day the advertisers were breaking US law. It is kind of like putting crack for sale in your storefront…

> it was launched in 2007

An ads platform launched in 2007. The current one is very much an entirely new platform.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#90

Post by the_watcher »

ethanbond wrote: post #50
downandout wrote: post #44

I discovered something quite similar to this several months ago and tried to submit it as a bug report. One can easily make the display URL of any shared post be anything they choose (screenshot of spoofed whitehouse.gov link [1] and techcrunch.com link [2]), while the link actually goes to any site the user wants. I was told, quite simply, that it wasn't a bug. No one seems to care about the implications of this. [1…

Well no, they do care about the implications. The implication being that by cutting out fraudulent but paying users, they will have fewer paying users. Advertisers and the networks that serve them will never be on the consumer's side. If a consumer wanted to do what an advertiser wanted, the advertiser would be out of work. It's all subversion.

> Advertisers and the networks that serve them will never be on the consumer's side.

This is a danger, but in an optimal system, one that doesn't come into play. Advertisers pay for eyeballs, eyeballs are there because they haven't been driven away from the product by ads that ruin the experience.

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