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The scam YouTube ads are getting better

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Re: The scam YouTube ads are getting better

#11

Why would Youtube care to police bad actors? They are taking this money directly to their quarterly revenue.

The only reason I can think of is so they can keep up their "we need to police bad actors" image necessary to maintain the moral high ground when they mistreat creators for the sake of sanitizing their platform.

Re: The scam YouTube ads are getting better

#13
post #10

Everyone focuses on how scamming and AI is evolving. I'm rather curious how this will affect marketing. Celebrity endorsements is useful for building trust. I wonder if we see more or less of that in the future.

Are celebrity endorsements actually useful for building trust? Usually i view them in a negative light, thinking that they just paid someone to promote the product, rather that a genuine and organic endorsement.

Re: The scam YouTube ads are getting better

#14
post #8

A long time ago, my grandmother got a call one day saying that I was hurt badly and needed money. That I was afraid to contact my parents because I had been doing something I shouldn't have, and all my grandmother needed to do was send money to this hospital, which was just some scammers fake information. I hate scammers. The idea that now you will be able to create videos, that interact and respond to questions, as…

The type of attack you're concerned with doesn't scale. The scammers would first have to collect your likeness to use to make the video or audio. It _would_ work for the more targeted attacks. People will have to establish passphrases.

Passphrases probably don't work well with the target demographic that most needs it (elderly people). Maybe teach teach them to verify through another channel instead. I.e, hang up and call back at the number you usually use. That's what we just implemented at my company. If one of our CXO's (video) calls or writes to authorize a transfer of funds, then politely say you will, hang up, and call back the CXO in question at their regular number to verify.

Re: The scam YouTube ads are getting better

#16
Is it a demise like Twitter? I mostly see scam ads both places, does it mean proper advertisers have given up on these?

And at what time should we start making advertising companies like Google, Meta etc responsible for what they show? They will of course claim it's not feasible to monitor and approve each ad. But they're quite happy to take the money and show them.

Re: The scam YouTube ads are getting better

#17
YouTube, Google, Facebook and Instagram (ie Alphabet and Meta) should be prosecuted and fined for every scam ad they publish on their networks and all responsible people from CEOs down to managers and directors in the advertising division should serve prison time for their crimes. It's incredible how lax prosecutors and law enforcement are on these frauds.

Re: The scam YouTube ads are getting better

#18
It is not AI that is getting better. It is Google that gets greedy. Google accepts money from some random businesses.

Not everybody should have the ability to distribute such scams to YouTube, where it is broadcasted everywhere.

Ad reach should be decided on the reliability of the advertiser.

Re: The scam YouTube ads are getting better

#19

A long time ago, my grandmother got a call one day saying that I was hurt badly and needed money. That I was afraid to contact my parents because I had been doing something I shouldn't have, and all my grandmother needed to do was send money to this hospital, which was just some scammers fake information. I hate scammers. The idea that now you will be able to create videos, that interact and respond to questions, as…

Would it make sense for scammers to bother doing the research needed for that? The scam works by itself without those things. My grandmother has gotten that call many times and they can't even be bothered to figure out the names of any of the grandkids. Learning the likenesses and collecting voice information is a whole different animal.

Re: The scam YouTube ads are getting better

#20
It reminds me of the fact that the "Fake Mr Beast giveaway" ads that even raised some attention here on Hacker News [1] a while ago are still around. In fact, I have seen one yesterday. Those must have been flagged as impersonation and scam thousands of times by many people, including me personally, and Youtube finds them perfectly fine.

After that episode, where I tried myself to get rid of them, I am much more convinced that Youtube is fine with all but the worst scammers, and don't buy any of the "they're just low on manpower" arguments anymore.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34943047

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