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Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

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Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#371

Post by bluGill »

mrguyorama wrote: post #369
bluGill wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet in the days of newspapers companies collected data to see how well their ads worked. There are a lot of statisticians working in this area - or there were 20 years ago.

The scam in online advertising is far more sinister; Google uses their panopticon to show your ad to a user who is just about to buy your product and then claim a conversion. So the stats look like Google is getting you thousands of conversions, when they only actually got a hundred people to look at your product who weren't already interested. This kind of bullshit was not possible in legacy advertisement. A billboa…

Statisticians can figure out if the ad google shows was to someone who would buy anyway.

yes a lot of ad spend is wasted but they can prove what was still useful enough to be worth spending despite the waste and which was not.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#372

Post by kmeisthax »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #12

Scam ads and the sale of banned goods. They don't do anything about it because they aren't liable. Repeal section 230 If you place these ads you should be held accountable. Meta has a duty to know who they're taking money from.

Naah, I'd rather not go back to the days of noted penny-stock scammer Jordan Belfort suing every online forum to hide evidence of his crimes as "defamation", thank you very much.

Furthermore, the precedent that CDA 230 was intended to overturn would not help much. Fraud isn't defamation, and there's all sorts of lying you can do in advertising that doesn't rise to the level of fraud in the eyes of the law. So the courts might just decline to extend the Belfort precedent to the advertising business altogether.

What you want is a law that explicitly says "CDA 230 does not apply to fraudulent advertising", explicitly defining advertising as any speech that the speaker is paying to publish on the platform. This neatly exempts all the same speech that CDA 230 was intended to protect while still allowing you to sue the shit out of Facebook[0] for taking money from scammers.

tl;dr Free Speech should only apply to free speech. Money speech is not Free Speech.

[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#375

Post by mrguyorama »

stusmall wrote: post #275
iammrpayments wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s zero to none manual review. The people who run these type of ads probably burn 100 facebook ad accounts per day

Oh definitely. I have zero expectation of high level of manual reviews. You can run limited runs of adds for next to a couple dollars. The math could never work out. I understand a lot with make it through the system, this was just so blatant. It should be so easy to catch with an automated system. It was nothing but red flags. The automated systems could reject outright or maybe escalate to manual review if it met e…

>The math could never work out.

Horseshit. Running an ad in a local publication was also pretty damn cheap and was always human reviewed.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#376

Post by fainpul »

james_marks wrote: post #294
frankc wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are all going to need to have personal passwords/safe words we don't reveal to untrusted parties for authentication. Or maybe personal retinal scanners? I think personal auth might be an interesting startup to get ahead of this.

So they’ll call you first with the fake video of your mom. You’ll be suspicious and ask for the pass phrase. The attacker now knows the nature of the protection you setup between you and your mom. And then the real attack on your mom, with you describing the system you’d agreed to, and claiming you can’t remember the word/phrase. Better is the Terminator-style lie to see if it gets detected.

Mom-in-the-middle attack

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#377

Post by 9rx »

malfist wrote: post #335
9rx wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can only buy good/services that are for sale The world is full of custom car builders. Buying a something like the F-150, but without the undesirable computing components, is quite practical and very possible. It'll be expensive , which I expect is what you were really trying to say when you pretend there is no such thing for sale, but you're just returning us to the heart of discussion: The F-150 is cheap, com…

Yes, the world is full of custom car builders. I'm sure I'll find someone that can build me a replica of the f150 lightning that doesn't enable spyware on me. Mind to help me out a bit and point me at a few companies doing that? Around Kentucky if you don't mind since that's where I am.

I'd start with Ford. They're well known for their custom builds — what they call VSO. And they're already tooled up for production of an F-150-style vehicle around Kentucky to boot.

It won't come cheap like an F-150, but nobody can expect it to be cheap when the value proposition is much higher.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#378

Post by gummydogg »

jerf wrote: post #67
cj wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is the already-existing trend towards walled gardens will simply continue. When a public space is dangerous, people retreat into "safe" enclosed spaces. - "Never download anything unless it's from the Apple App Store" - "Never buy anything unless you're on amazon.com" - "Dont use the internet outside of ChatGPT"

Yes, but observe how that for all three of the things that immediately came to your mind, you have respectively 1. a thing that still has a lot of scams in it (though it may be the best of the three) [1] 2. A thing so full of scams and fake products that using it is already a minefield (one my mother-in-law is already incapable of navigating successfully, based on the number of shirts my family has gotten with lazy-A…

I don’t accept the excuse it’s too hard. If they have to spend $10 billion per year to maintain an acceptable level trust on their platforms then so be it. It’s the cost of doing business. If I went into a mall and opened up a fake Wells Fargo bank branch it would be shut down pretty instantly by human intervention. These are the conditions most businesses run under. Why should these platforms given such leeway just because ‘it’s hard’? Size and scale shouldn’t be an excuse. If its not viable to prevent fraud then they don’t have a viable business.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#379

Post by jprd »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #28
macNchz wrote: post #16

Alongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong incentives to control this problem. They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it’d be worse for them on two fronts: they’d have to pay for more moderation, and they’d lose billions in reven…

I don't see how the yearly tech support I do with my parents at Christmas will not one day converge to an outright ban of the internet. I am now demoing the level of sofistication of AI powered scams, telling them that it is now entirely possible they will get a VIDEO CALL from me that's not actually me asking for God knows what in a very convincing way using my face and voice. I am scared and this close to setting u…

My mom did this in the '80s so we weren't kidnapped, even by a family member. I'm not going to share the secret phrase, but it has stuck with me and I use it with my kids too.

I know most of that was driven by the tragedy of Adam Walsh, but it was still great OpSec I'll never drop.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#380

Post by gummydogg »

I deal with domain impersonation and fraudulent ad takedowns nearly every day. A year ago, Meta would remove fake ads falsely using my company’s branding within a day or two. Now these same ads run for over a month with no action taken. This isn’t just an inconvenience these scams cause real harm. The money fraudsters extract fuels their expansion into larger operations. Meta has become completely negligent in its enforcement responsibilities and shows no empathy for the victims it enables. Meta is the single largest enabler of this fraud ecosystem the operations fund human trafficking, force, labor, and systematic financial fraud, targeting vulnerable populations, particularly elderly victims, who lose their life savings at a point in time where they have no time to earn it back. Every dollars these criminals make through Meta platform goes to some of the most depraved actors on the planet.
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