I suspect there are either employees or contractors getting a cut because even getting a legitimate ad that doesn’t break any rules through review can be an exercise in frustration.
I once spent days getting rejection after rejection for ads for a Christmas light show event at a vineyard (not winery, it was a dry event), on the grounds that I was apparently selling alcohol.
Meanwhile I get ads for black market cigarettes, shrooms, roids, cannabis, and anything else you can imagine.
Yes please I totally agree. Something big must be going on there. I once bought an item through an Instagram ad. For about a month I got fake updates about shipping. Then one day I get an email that itvwas delivered 2 days ago, complete with a different shipping path and an apparently real USPS tracking ID. Of course I received nothing. Complained to PayPal, the complaint was closed within minutes as not valid.
What compelled you to buy something through an ad? Does it often work? My operating assumption is that every click-through internet ad other than major brands (Apple, car makers, etc) is basically a scam.
I've bought shirts I've seen through Facebook ads before. Ads can work, but Facebook is propped up with so many scams these days you have to wonder at what point do they get investigated over it? Amazon has had a similar problem, I've seen loads of threads here over it. I have been fortunate enough that most things I've bought off amazon have been legit.
I've gotten to the point where I consider anything advertised to me to be at least somewhere on the "scam spectrum". With the actual value/scamminess being indicated by a number of factors:
1. Frequency: The more I see ads for something, the more of a scam / less value I believe it to be.
2. Channel: Anything on YouTube or social media is 100% unequivocally a huge scam. To the point where if I think a product is legit or worthwhile, and I happen to see it on YouTube, I will change my mind and not even consider purchasing it.
3. Algorithmic vs. word of mouth: Anything I see that is obviously algorithmically fed to me (like recommendations, "you might like" and "featured" products) increases the scamminess / decreases the value.
It's too bad that legit small businesses trying to crack into a market are collateral damage, and I feel for them, but the ad pond is full of scum and if you're legit and you dive into it, you're going to get scum all over you.
I agree and I would similarly reconsider any purchase if I saw an ad for the product or company online. At this stage it's almost like if you have to advertise then you're not worth it.
How do we find what's worth buying then? Word of mouth, trying things in stores, reviews where they buy the products and are not given them.
I've blocked ads from my online experience for 20 years now, and I don't watch broadcast TV or radio, I live in a small town so I don't see much visual advertising. I feel like I'm at close to ad free as you can be in our ad saturated world. I don't feel that much is different between myself and our neighbours except that their house is full of shite they buy and throw out. None of it qol improving things. And we still have lots of material things, it's not like I spend no money. I guess my point is: what is the actual point of all this advertising anyway if you could remove it and not much changes. Make the world better, give us back our attention by default, we'll still buy stuff!
This has the same answer as when people ask "How do we find dating prospects without the internet?". Same way we did before the internet was a thing ;)
While I suppose I haven't technically seen a recent scam ad pretending to be a major brand, I have seen use of copyrighted art (Disney or anime characters), and Elon Musk's face, to imply they represented a major brand.
Yeah, don't do that. Instagram ads are no different to the WURGLBIXY and HUYTVING and XORMLINAP and other smashed up syllable "brands" on Amazon, except they'll mostly deliver something to you, even if it is shit.
Take any of the images from an Instagram ad. Someone, somewhere, did (probably) build or design the product being sold (a lot come from Kickstarter and may have never launched), but if you search you'll find hundreds or more scams riding on that coattails who will hope to collect and fuck off with your money before IG shuts them down (if they ever do).
I took an IEC power cable that came with a no-name broken printer my folks bought off Amazon. It was rated for the usual North American 120V/15A, but the conductors on the inside were hardly suitable. Measuring with cheap calipers, I reckoned they were good for about 1/10th of that. Similarly dangerous products with any of the generic electronics currently selling on Amazon/Temu/eBay/et al. Poor isolation, poor grounding, underrated wires, incorrect fuses, knock-off ICs, lord knows what kind of chemical treatments and/or lead content; It's as if regulations no longer exist, since there's no longer any fixed target that can be sued to enforce them. Something will need to be done directly to Amazon that will cause them to put a check on these products, but that seems laughably naive in the current political contexts.
Amazon has sold fraudulent fuses that will kill people for years and they don't care. Big Youtubers did videos to try to get Amazon to care. Amazon just does not care if people die because caring would impact their business model. They are straight evil at this point.
Yeah, Amazon literally could not give less of a fuck. Leave a review on the seller, deleted. Leave one on the product, deleted. They say it's because of co-mingling but sorry, that's your hole you dug yourself, Amazon.
And why did you remove the option on returns to say "I think this is counterfeit"? etc. etc.
Full willful head in the sand.
Anything electric/electronic like that, now, I only order from places like Adorama or B&H or the manufacturer. And then actual "higher" end ones like Anker, etc.
"We're just a marketplace". I really need to revisit leaving Amazon as a resolution.
Same on X. It’s possible that the scammers just operate networks of credit cards and domains and rotate as soon as they grt flagged. Numbers game basically. But it’s also possible that the rules are applied differently to advertisers that bring in a lot of cash, regardless of legality.
I don't think it was Jack's fault, but Twitter went from something that (granted they did tend to do a few shady things from a UX perspective) was fine and largely worked but did have a massive censorship problem, to something that works less well (seriously? i can't see posts chronologically without an account? on TWITTER???) and apparently still has censorship (although I was mostly preoccupied with covid, actual doctors getting banned for truthful information, pre-Musk)
Exactly. Blatant scam ads are reported to no avail, and I see them still multiple times a day.
After reading Careless People, it became much more tangible. "Yes people are motivated by money", but Zuck and others at the top of FB actively make a point of expending significant effort to avoid fixing things. It's not that they don't know, or care, it's that they know and care about keeping the gravy train at full speed while they pat themselves on the back for being masters of the universe, so to speak.
Adding to this frustration is a 25yr registered 501(c)3 non-profit I volunteer for that holds an annual art festival. The festival proceeds go to funding educational materials. They've had an active facebook page for at least 15 years, with thousands of followers from around the world.
When the non-profit tried to advertise the art festival on Facebook. Facebook not only denied them, but when the non-profit asked for a review of the denial they were warned if they asked again their entire facebook page would be flagged and deleted.
Facebook is large enough I cannot imagine their reasoning. They very likely have several conflicting streams of logic depending on teams involved. One thing I think is reasonable is that money is a motivational factor for Facebook.
Put simply, organizations who come in immediately spending money on advertising are more likely to be fast tracked. Organizations who don't spent a lot of money are more likely to be shut down. ("you've been a freeloader all this time who will likely not pay sustainably after this one-time payment. We're focusing on sustainable paying customers, goodbye")
Addition: Now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a literal metric of "money/time" ratio. The more money you spend in less time likely improves your chances of being fast-tracked, thus biasing new accounts who immediately spend on advertising over existing ones who sparsely pay.
Having worked in advertiser support: fb pages are basically an unsupported product and their support channels for advertising are farmed out to the lowest bidder.
They do bucket out support into spend tiers, although when I was there it was overall spend, not frequency
Not to distract from Meta but I’m surprised Google doesn’t also get heat for this. A number of phishing sites win >30% of the auction on my company’s brand keywords and I see it on many others as well, especially in CPG and e-commerce. I’ve yet to have any luck getting Google to ban the advertisers.
It's insane work when you just search "Coinbase" and literally the first or sponsored results are not Coinbase but scam sites. I've seen this first-hand in Google. Obviously SEO and DA isn't on their side so it has to just be like pay enough and you can push whatever you want.
My wife got hit by this. Click an ad for to a 100% fake site with deep discounts, put in her credit card, order never went through. I checked the advertiser and it was somewhere in China. A few days later, her CC was used to buy some gift cards online. At least it was a good learning experience.
I deleted my facebook. Its the only thing I can do it seems and I advice everyone to do the same. Screw this platform. Facebook’s scams have caused the elders in my family so much pain and me so much stress dealing with it, its not worth it. A monopolistic cancer on society.
Are people still using Facebook in 2026? I sometimes go back to my Facebook account, it is a complete wasteland, my feed is just generic doomscroll material, nothing new from actual people I know. Communities I follow mostly moved to Discord, it is also no longer where events like festivals post their latest news. Facebook looks like it is #1 on paper, but my experience is completely different, it is nothing like it was 10 years ago, in fact, a significant portion of my Facebook feed is "remember 5-10 years ago".
Some of the best B2C customers are on FB — willing to spend, low expectations, low maintenance.
If you add IG to the mix, it’s even better.
Your typical HNer does not really fall into “ideal customer” profile for most B2C businesses. Our saving grace is our above average income profile. Other than that, on average we are tolerated rather than sought after (imho).
Facebook marketplace has completely taken over the used sales business in my area (Pacific Northwest). Craigslist is dead, offer up is dead, FB marketplace won.
is this still really the case? I feel like Facebook Marketplace has been significantly more dead than even last year. and it definitely seems completely dead for things like rental listings.
It is huge around Seattle. Nothing else exists for selling goods. There are also private sales groups on FB as well for specialized interests, including illicit home meal delivery services. It seemed like shef.com was going to enter that space and win it but they seemingly abandoned parts of it and pivoted primarily towards weekly Indian meals. Sad, they used to have some amazing West African food.
It's become a defacto forum for a lot of local niche stuff like clubs, schools, non profits, and other special interest groups.
In my area there are groups related to a lot of different outdoor activities , and they share information, trip reports, etc. There might be some other forums for that, but they aren't as widely used or frequently updated.
I might look at my feed* perhaps 2-3 times a week; despite this, there's a good chance only one of my friends has posted anything new. Unfortunately, that particular friend is also a fairly cliché left-of-the-Cuban-Communist-Party (no, seriously) activist and 95% of her posts are "signal boosting" things I, a Brit living in Germany, do not have any connection to, e.g. "Demexit memes" or Bernie Sander's opinions about anything.
Doesn't help that this trillion dollar corporation still can't handle rotation metadata*, so if I see something and I want to share it, even if it's a good fit for my feed, 50% chance the pic looks stupid the moment I've uploaded it, to which I respond "ugh, never mind then" and forget about trying to solve this and don't post it.
You're right. But there's a generational aspect to this too.
Younger generations won't touch Facebook. It's seen as a platform for "old" people. So Facebook is on a modest decline. (Enter Instagram and Tiktok and all that to fill the void...)
I purposely don't use mine. They keep shadow profiles on you, if you're in IL you can sue them (there already was a lawsuit about it) and get some money from them.
I completely agree. I did this many years ago. The only thing that annoys me is that for many local things it’s the only option. I’m actually significantly less informed and involved in the local community because things are so heavily reliant on Facebook, and I refuse to sign back up.
I left Facebook over a decade ago, and it was painful to realize how many people simply forgot that I exist, and how many events I missed because many people exclusively use it to invite people.
Similar experience where I met someone in 2017 and was enraptured with them, and we eventually drifted apart because they only communicated through Snapchat and Instagram.
I often wonder if abstaining from the platforms that I dislike was worth the increase in loneliness and detachment from society, but I don't have access to the alternative universe where I decided to grit my teeth and accept the data hoarding companies and dark patterns as a tradeoff for being able to interact with people who couldn't care less about the technicalities.
I think, if someone refuses to interact with you unless it's over their preferred corporate advertising-delivery platform, then they really aren't your friend. Real friends are willing to put in effort and at least agree on a least common denominator communication channel!
My friends know I am not on Facebook. If they really want me to invite me to an event, they know how to reach me, and they do. Anything being communicated out only on Facebook, I just don't go to, and I probably wouldn't want to go to it anyway.
I've been off of Facebook for so long, I don't even remember when I quit. At least 10 years ago, probably 15. And I never joined Instagram, TikTok, or any of these other ad-delivery platforms. I don't feel that I am any more lonely or more detached from society because of it.
it is how it is, but nothing's stopping any of us from reaching out or calling a friend or sending a calendar invite. I used Facebook for a local animal shelter I was volunteering at, but from the infinite scroll filled with infinite ads, very little local things in the middle using "FB Purity" firefox addon to hide all the garbage you see how much garbage is actually there. it feels like I pulled away from a dark matrix of things designed to keep us hooked, then I look around and see everybody else hooked, commenting with bots, sharing facebook encouraging memes/new age spirituality posts and fb doing all it could to hook everybody's attention, getting riled up against political opinions, bots.
is the loneliness worth it? probably not. is the freedom? yes.
> where I decided to grit my teeth and accept the data hoarding companies and dark patterns as a tradeoff for being able to interact with people who couldn't care less about the technicalities.
I know, right? that infinite scroll/showing all the good things on the timelines isn't their real life, they're filling a void within themselves surfing short videos and voicing opinions on nearly everything.
even Zuckerberg said Facebook isn't for making/interacting with friends anymore, it's other things, and not good things.
you're not alone, and you're not detached from society, you're just unplugged from the matrix. of course I say this while browsing subreddits and hn, but hobbies and activities where we meet people, these are always going to be the best thing available to us. in the digital world there's plenty of people who'd be down for a LAN, a hangout, an event like going hiking, and I've met some cool people outside of social media but there's many days where it was me, 4 walls, a book/finding things to occupy my time.
They globally reset the privacy settings for pretty entertaining reasons. Every few years a post goes around saying crazy privacy things that gives you instructions to change your privacy settings to only “share with yourself”. If you’re dumb enough to do it, you basically shadow-ban yourself. If enough people do it, they have to change the settings back because also those same people will complain about their aunt/neighbor/dad/sister whatever not being able to see their posts and have no idea why.
Because companies have only existed for a few hundred years and we still haven't caught up with the idea of making things they do illegal. We tend to pass responsibility to the people who make up the company, rather than the corporation, but the people have gotten pretty good at making it impossible to assign blame to any individual. And you can't cost the owners (shareholders), because of course none of them are at fault, either.
Who at Meta is responsible for posting scam ads? Nobody. But Meta isn't responsible, either. So some executive makes a halfhearted promise to do something about it, but without any accountability.
The "limited liability" was just supposed to be for debts, but it turned out to be good for laundering responsibility, too. Originally, corporations had fixed term charters. And it might be worth looking at that again.
We need to start holding executives accountable for things going on in their companies, and go as far as holding board members, and if its an external company then hold them accountable as well, and their board members. Just go all the way on accountability to the point where it becomes hard to mess around because someone will freak out. I wonder how many "save my skin" whistleblowers we will see at the executive level if everyone at the top of a company can be held liable for stuff like this, that goes on for over a decade. Its pretty obvious Facebook KNOWS there's fraud, but they willfully do nothing, harming consumers everywhere.
What you would see is firms divesting from companies that do this to save their own skins too, so funds would dry up if they don't remediate it.
Liability is the answer to a lot of problems or lack of liability is the cause. Online BS can be solved if platforms were liable. Corporate BS can be solved if the humans at the top are liable.
My issue is you have to do it correctly, there's an insane amount of nuance involved, but the world could be fixed heavily by making more people liable, and big hedge fund investors just as liable.
It is profoundly ironic that Meta is apparently using cloaking techniques against regulators. Cloaking is a black-hat technique where you show one version of a landing page to the ad review bot (e.g., a blog about health) and a different version to the actual user (e.g., a diet pill scam).
Meta has spent years building AI to detect when affiliates cloak their links. Now, according to this report, Meta is essentially cloaking the ads themselves from journalists and regulators by likely filtering based on user profiling, IP ranges, or behavioral signals. They are using the sophisticated targeting tools intended for advertisers to target the "absence" of scrutiny.
"First, they identified the top keywords and celebrity names that Japanese Ad Library users employed to find the fraud ads. Then they ran identical searches repeatedly, deleting ads that appeared fraudulent from the library and Meta’s platforms."
That doesn't sound like cloaking. They really are deleting the ads. They're just concentrating on the ads that the regulators are most likely to see based on what they usually search for.
> The scrubbing, Meta teams explained in documents regarding their efforts to reduce scam discoverability, sought to make problematic content “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists.”
This seems to be the "smoking gun"... but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
Needs verification on the normal user side of the experience. Like noted, unclear whether the ads are completely deleted, or just deleted from what regulators would return in search results.
Later part makes it sounds like the ads were at least deleted from the Japanese / Taiwan results areas completely, and then just redistributed to other geographic areas.
"If an unverified advertiser is blocked from showing ads in Taiwan, for example, Meta will show those ads more frequently to users elsewhere, creating a whack-a-mole dynamic in which scam ads prohibited in one jurisdiction pop up in another."
However, still difficult to tell from the story what the experience of "normal" Japanese / Taiwan users is relative to what regulators view.
Notably, from a different article about fake accounts, and how much they cost, Japan's regulation seems to be working (at least somewhat). [1] Fake Accounts for Facebook Available (US, 157,401, @$0.13/account; Japan, 16, @$3.00/account, Dec 31st, 2025 data)
Not quite. The ads themselves aren't deleted but only not displayed for a subset of keywords. If the ads were deleted no keyword would be able to show these.
If there are multiple ads (and why would there not be multiple ads?), deleting the one advertised using keyword X does nothing to the one advertised using keyword Y.
I do not yet know if there's wrongdoing here, but even if it was screaming bad, all US government enforcement bodies have been gutted and made completely subservient to the will of the president rather than their legislatively mandated mission, under a novel "unitary executive" philosophy.
Further, that unitary executive is completely corrupt, and has already been paid off by Meta. Ukraine is a model of clean government with proper anti-corruption investigations and teeth compared to the US.
You are expecting third party countries to begin litigation on crimes that happen outside of their borders - even if they're not even strictly illegal where they're headquartered?
That shit never happens, and if it would, you'd first have to start jailing lots of S&P CEOs for the companies crimes that are committed in other countries and never amount to anything, precisely for the same reason.
Like literally every company thats involved in any mining, drilling etc. They always don't adhere to local environmental regulations etc
What? No, you are completely wrong. The crime was committed in many places. In the USA, but also in several EU countries (Germany included).
In fact, the numbers were more than 10x higher in the EU (since we use a lot more diesel cars) than what they were in the USA.
600 000 vehicles were affected in the USA, while 8.5 million vehicles were affected in the EU.
USA courts, effectively, issued a fine more than 200x higher per vehicle affected, than what we did in the EU.
No one that actually followed the news (and isn't German and therefore completely biased) will say with a straight face that EU justice system didn't favor VW due to established interests. The German government obviously manipulated the judicial system all over Europe to let the case go away.
It also says a lot, that it had to be the Americans bringing the case to light. A lot of people probably knew, but the control that the Germans had (and still have) over European economy and judicial systems didn't allow anyone inside the EU to speak up.
Not to mention Uber's little program to detect whether a rider was likely to be law/code enforcement in cities where there were restrictions on Uber operations.
Not sure why this only seems to happen with IG ads, but I've noticed twice already that i'll purchase something on IG for a fixed price, and it will automatically enroll me into a monthly subscription plan without any chance to cancel it. Further, the subscription can then not be cancelled without email interaction -- no web-based cancellation.
The checkout screen had no mention of a subscription or any cost of a subscription, so not even sure how this is legal.
It has not gotten to the point where I dont make any purchase via IG. I'll independently search for the product and purchase it (usually less expensively via Amazon.com).
Not sure how this is good for IG, because the attribution is then not matched on the purchase. Further, not sure how this is even good for the merchant, since I'll inevitably have to do a chargeback.
3 or 4 years ago I tried Google Adwords to see if I could gain new customers. I admit I had a niche business, it was already successful, but I had read prior about certain tech companies overcharging - - or not cancelling services after you requested, so I opted to use only pre-paid credit cards bought at my local drug store. I chose $200 limit per card. That lasted for about 1.5 to 2 years, several times Google emailed me that my card expired or ran out of $$, and I needed to correct the error. That's when I bought another pre-paid card for a limit of $200 and funded my acct again. I never noticed any uptick in customers contacting me from my websites.
Eventually Google shut down the ability to use pre-paid credit cards (it came back an error when I attempted to enter the new card no) and that's when I closed my account. Their response was too obvious evidence <Goggle in conspiracy with the ad click bots> desired the ability to scam my account and one day I would check my email and get a $5,000 bill.
There is a rather obvious "conflict of interest" when you have to dispute a charge with your credit card provider knowing that the credit card co is fully aware they only make their "cut" if the charge goes through.
Prepaid credit cards tend to be a very common fraud vector (very similar to gift card scams).
For chargebacks, the merchant has to pay at least a $15 fee on every chargeback, regardless of the outcome of the result. It's why many merchants prefer for you to contact them and ask for a refund rather than going through the chargeback process. For small purchases, merchants tend to just refund rather than dealing with an angry customer that's going to charge back.
On the other hand, prepaid credit cards seem to be one of the only ways to prevent merchants from "running up" the charges on a customers account. Sure, a customer can go through the dispute process but it's quite a hassle. Just "limiting the amount of money you place on the table" is quite effective. Giving a merchant your credit card with say a $5,000 or more available balance seems like insanity, like laying out 50 of $100 bills on the table: "here, go ahead, can I trust you to take only what you should" ? I would pay extra to have a VISA or MC credit card that only offers say a $200 limit, just for dubious situations, but again, providers have a "conflict of interest" in that they only make their "cut" when the charges go through, so the more and the larger the charges - - the more "cut" they obtain.
A prepaid card doesn't prevent you from being liable for a bill. This is like how leaving your wallet at home when you visit a resteraunt doesn't entitle you to free food because they don't charge you up front.
No but it significantly raises the effort for collecting said money. The company would need to have a strong case (that they need to be able to defend in court if necessary) to do it.
No scummy company relying on dark patterns/etc to charge the customer without their consent will dare potentially airing this dirty laundry in front of a judge.
I consider it immoral to dodge paying bills just because you can get away with it. This is like saying it's okay to shoplift because a store may not think it's worth it to go through the legal process to come after you.
I adjust my morals to match those of the entity I'm dealing with. I have no problems "stealing" from a company who is trying to steal money from me by sneaking in unexpected charges.
Nextgrid hit the nail on the head. If you are being an honest customer, but a company is attempting to "blackmail" you into paying bogus or "run up" charges like Google Adwords, which multiple reports indicate they are more than 70% bot generated hits, you can sue them in your local jurisdiction, here we have justice of the peace, small claims, force the big corp to hire local counsel.
Do they want to take it higher ? Taunt them with "dumping discovery on them", otherwise known as a far reaching motion for discovery, they'll be forced to deliver a tractor trailer load of paper . . .
With all due respect, historically, the guy with the greenbacks holds the upper hand in any deal. Many abide by the rule: “The customer is always right”.
Internet merchants often with unrealistic low pricing to “bait you” are attempting to sway the balance in their favor by cutting corners, eliminating posting a telephone number answered promptly by a live human being, too often sending out “one way” do-not-reply emails, which is shameful. Recently I encountered a tactic whereby a large corporate health care company would ONLY discuss matters over a phone call, so unless you were recording the conversation (and provide proper legal notice of such at beginning of call) there was no record of the conversation (now internet providers like Spectrum are doing the same). In fact, they were attempting to force me to sign a 30+ page contract full of legalese and “boilerplate” in their doscusign pdf format which coincidentally disallows one from modifying or typing in any disclaimers within the signature line. They refused over multiple communications to respond to several of my questions regarding costs and any future billing. I finally just stonewalled them by saying I would only communicate via email so there would be a written record.
I can regularly obtain a live human on the phone with Amazon and have always received a favorable response - - - obviously Amazon values their reputation. I personally will not do business with any company that fails to provide a telephone number answered promptly by a live human.
Often I buy locally from brick and mortar shops with return policies in the event the product doesn't hold up to expectations. The somewhat higher prices I pay at brick and mortar are just “added insurance” that doesn't even compare to the serious disappointment or anger one experiences from some internet purchases where the seller sent a fake or missing GPU card, or the item coming from China has no reasonable cost of shipping it back “hoping” for a refund, or even a US merchant who refuses to honor a valid return. Now that memory prices have exploded, I expect to see even more of these fake or missing GPU shipments from online sellers.
Having been a former cc merchant, I know that any merchant that receives a chargeback will suffer at least a $35 hit, plus more on the time and effort to respond and fight the chargeback, indeed I encourage all buyers to challenge any that we discover dishonest. Merchants getting enough chargebacks will suffer the company providing the merchant account cancelling their business merchant account, often the merchants are are then “blacklisted” in the cc industry.
The original reuters article quotes Meta as claiming that making them harder to find by removing them from the system. This article doesn't offer any evidence to suggest that Meta is lying. This is lazy and poor reporting as far as I'm concerned.
The issue as I see it is that these searches are run when testers look for them, not on a regular basis. If Facebook can detect them, why let them be displayed in the first place?
Restaurant seen throwing waste in dumpster after removing it from food inspector's plate. Insists there's no other waste on other plates, apparently without checking.
What proportion of the scam ads do you think this approach caught?
I'm not sure, but starting with the ads that appear with most popular searches isn't a bad idea per se. It's a bit like sending law enforcement to protect popular areas.
>Restaurant seen throwing waste in dumpster after removing it from food inspector's plate. Insists there's no other waste on other plates, apparently without checking.
That seems... kinda reasonable?
Health inspector: "hey it looks like your ice machine is dirty, and you're not keeping foods at a hot enough temperature"
Restaurant: "ok we'll clean our ice machines more carefully and install thermometers to monitor the temperature of our hot trays"
Journalist: "Restaurant made health violations harder to find instead of removing them!"
Would it be better if the restaurant was proactively fixing issues before the health inspector brought it up? Yes. Does it make sense to imply that the restaurant was acting maliciously by making health violations "harder to find"? No.
Regulators can't verify every single Facebook ad. So, they take a sample. Facebook is creating a Potemkin village - trying to provide a clean sample. It suggests they don't believe that a wider sample would pass muster.
It's more like if the health inspector found e coli in the spaghetti, so Facebook threw out the spaghetti then said "trust us, you don't need to check the macaroni, it's fine."
That sounds funny, until you realize that there are people who pull ingredients from the waste bin if they still look "good enough". At least one restaurant chain owner in germany was banned from entering his own restaurants after he was caught on camera instructing his staff to do just that, apparently only one instance of a long chain of food safety violations his "frugal" business practices caused.
I suspect there are either employees or contractors getting a cut because even getting a legitimate ad that doesn’t break any rules through review can be an exercise in frustration.
I once spent days getting rejection after rejection for ads for a Christmas light show event at a vineyard (not winery, it was a dry event), on the grounds that I was apparently selling alcohol.
Meanwhile I get ads for black market cigarettes, shrooms, roids, cannabis, and anything else you can imagine.
Yes please I totally agree. Something big must be going on there. I once bought an item through an Instagram ad. For about a month I got fake updates about shipping. Then one day I get an email that itvwas delivered 2 days ago, complete with a different shipping path and an apparently real USPS tracking ID. Of course I received nothing. Complained to PayPal, the complaint was closed within minutes as not valid.
What compelled you to buy something through an ad? Does it often work? My operating assumption is that every click-through internet ad other than major brands (Apple, car makers, etc) is basically a scam.
I've bought shirts I've seen through Facebook ads before. Ads can work, but Facebook is propped up with so many scams these days you have to wonder at what point do they get investigated over it? Amazon has had a similar problem, I've seen loads of threads here over it. I have been fortunate enough that most things I've bought off amazon have been legit.
Yes, it often works. Ads are basically the only way for small business discovery.
I've gotten to the point where I consider anything advertised to me to be at least somewhere on the "scam spectrum". With the actual value/scamminess being indicated by a number of factors:
1. Frequency: The more I see ads for something, the more of a scam / less value I believe it to be.
2. Channel: Anything on YouTube or social media is 100% unequivocally a huge scam. To the point where if I think a product is legit or worthwhile, and I happen to see it on YouTube, I will change my mind and not even consider purchasing it.
3. Algorithmic vs. word of mouth: Anything I see that is obviously algorithmically fed to me (like recommendations, "you might like" and "featured" products) increases the scamminess / decreases the value.
It's too bad that legit small businesses trying to crack into a market are collateral damage, and I feel for them, but the ad pond is full of scum and if you're legit and you dive into it, you're going to get scum all over you.
I agree and I would similarly reconsider any purchase if I saw an ad for the product or company online. At this stage it's almost like if you have to advertise then you're not worth it.
How do we find what's worth buying then? Word of mouth, trying things in stores, reviews where they buy the products and are not given them.
I've blocked ads from my online experience for 20 years now, and I don't watch broadcast TV or radio, I live in a small town so I don't see much visual advertising. I feel like I'm at close to ad free as you can be in our ad saturated world. I don't feel that much is different between myself and our neighbours except that their house is full of shite they buy and throw out. None of it qol improving things. And we still have lots of material things, it's not like I spend no money. I guess my point is: what is the actual point of all this advertising anyway if you could remove it and not much changes. Make the world better, give us back our attention by default, we'll still buy stuff!
> How do we find what's worth buying then?
This has the same answer as when people ask "How do we find dating prospects without the internet?". Same way we did before the internet was a thing ;)
Does not really work well any more. Few in person stores and reputable brands.
While I suppose I haven't technically seen a recent scam ad pretending to be a major brand, I have seen use of copyrighted art (Disney or anime characters), and Elon Musk's face, to imply they represented a major brand.
Yeah, don't do that. Instagram ads are no different to the WURGLBIXY and HUYTVING and XORMLINAP and other smashed up syllable "brands" on Amazon, except they'll mostly deliver something to you, even if it is shit.
Take any of the images from an Instagram ad. Someone, somewhere, did (probably) build or design the product being sold (a lot come from Kickstarter and may have never launched), but if you search you'll find hundreds or more scams riding on that coattails who will hope to collect and fuck off with your money before IG shuts them down (if they ever do).
I took an IEC power cable that came with a no-name broken printer my folks bought off Amazon. It was rated for the usual North American 120V/15A, but the conductors on the inside were hardly suitable. Measuring with cheap calipers, I reckoned they were good for about 1/10th of that. Similarly dangerous products with any of the generic electronics currently selling on Amazon/Temu/eBay/et al. Poor isolation, poor grounding, underrated wires, incorrect fuses, knock-off ICs, lord knows what kind of chemical treatments and/or lead content; It's as if regulations no longer exist, since there's no longer any fixed target that can be sued to enforce them. Something will need to be done directly to Amazon that will cause them to put a check on these products, but that seems laughably naive in the current political contexts.
Amazon has sold fraudulent fuses that will kill people for years and they don't care. Big Youtubers did videos to try to get Amazon to care. Amazon just does not care if people die because caring would impact their business model. They are straight evil at this point.
Yeah, Amazon literally could not give less of a fuck. Leave a review on the seller, deleted. Leave one on the product, deleted. They say it's because of co-mingling but sorry, that's your hole you dug yourself, Amazon.
And why did you remove the option on returns to say "I think this is counterfeit"? etc. etc.
Full willful head in the sand.
Anything electric/electronic like that, now, I only order from places like Adorama or B&H or the manufacturer. And then actual "higher" end ones like Anker, etc.
"We're just a marketplace". I really need to revisit leaving Amazon as a resolution.
Always baffles me when there's rules that criminals can just get past, at the expense of normal users who are being genuine.
Same on X. It’s possible that the scammers just operate networks of credit cards and domains and rotate as soon as they grt flagged. Numbers game basically. But it’s also possible that the rules are applied differently to advertisers that bring in a lot of cash, regardless of legality.
I don't think it was Jack's fault, but Twitter went from something that (granted they did tend to do a few shady things from a UX perspective) was fine and largely worked but did have a massive censorship problem, to something that works less well (seriously? i can't see posts chronologically without an account? on TWITTER???) and apparently still has censorship (although I was mostly preoccupied with covid, actual doctors getting banned for truthful information, pre-Musk)
the covid censorship stuff is still an underdiscussed scar on humanity, even on this platform!
> seriously? i can't see posts chronologically without an account? on TWITTER???
From twitter's POV, that's a feature, not a bug. It's intentional.
I bought my daughter a shirt I saw in a Facebook ad, from Chalk & Stone. The shirt arrived and is great.
Exactly. Blatant scam ads are reported to no avail, and I see them still multiple times a day.
After reading Careless People, it became much more tangible. "Yes people are motivated by money", but Zuck and others at the top of FB actively make a point of expending significant effort to avoid fixing things. It's not that they don't know, or care, it's that they know and care about keeping the gravy train at full speed while they pat themselves on the back for being masters of the universe, so to speak.
10% of Meta revenue is AI scam ads, Meta gets a cut, so they hide it.
Adding to this frustration is a 25yr registered 501(c)3 non-profit I volunteer for that holds an annual art festival. The festival proceeds go to funding educational materials. They've had an active facebook page for at least 15 years, with thousands of followers from around the world.
When the non-profit tried to advertise the art festival on Facebook. Facebook not only denied them, but when the non-profit asked for a review of the denial they were warned if they asked again their entire facebook page would be flagged and deleted.
Facebook is large enough I cannot imagine their reasoning. They very likely have several conflicting streams of logic depending on teams involved. One thing I think is reasonable is that money is a motivational factor for Facebook.
Put simply, organizations who come in immediately spending money on advertising are more likely to be fast tracked. Organizations who don't spent a lot of money are more likely to be shut down. ("you've been a freeloader all this time who will likely not pay sustainably after this one-time payment. We're focusing on sustainable paying customers, goodbye")
Addition: Now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a literal metric of "money/time" ratio. The more money you spend in less time likely improves your chances of being fast-tracked, thus biasing new accounts who immediately spend on advertising over existing ones who sparsely pay.
Having worked in advertiser support: fb pages are basically an unsupported product and their support channels for advertising are farmed out to the lowest bidder.
They do bucket out support into spend tiers, although when I was there it was overall spend, not frequency
Thanks for the insights! That was helpful.
Bro you may have just been socially engineered to give out the internal workings of Facebook from a neo crime lab.
You don't have to socially engineer someone who already doesn't care ;)
What's your mother's maiden name? (Humor)
My username is a dumb old name, but it's the one I have.
is it really that difficult to conclude support quality is tied to overall advertiser spend?
Not to distract from Meta but I’m surprised Google doesn’t also get heat for this. A number of phishing sites win >30% of the auction on my company’s brand keywords and I see it on many others as well, especially in CPG and e-commerce. I’ve yet to have any luck getting Google to ban the advertisers.
I think 80% of my Youtube ads are either outright scams or AI generated ads for questionable "as seen on TV" style products.
I remember getting "lend us your google account" ad ON YOUTUBE of all places
It's insane work when you just search "Coinbase" and literally the first or sponsored results are not Coinbase but scam sites. I've seen this first-hand in Google. Obviously SEO and DA isn't on their side so it has to just be like pay enough and you can push whatever you want.
My wife got hit by this. Click an ad for to a 100% fake site with deep discounts, put in her credit card, order never went through. I checked the advertiser and it was somewhere in China. A few days later, her CC was used to buy some gift cards online. At least it was a good learning experience.
I deleted my facebook. Its the only thing I can do it seems and I advice everyone to do the same. Screw this platform. Facebook’s scams have caused the elders in my family so much pain and me so much stress dealing with it, its not worth it. A monopolistic cancer on society.
Are people still using Facebook in 2026? I sometimes go back to my Facebook account, it is a complete wasteland, my feed is just generic doomscroll material, nothing new from actual people I know. Communities I follow mostly moved to Discord, it is also no longer where events like festivals post their latest news. Facebook looks like it is #1 on paper, but my experience is completely different, it is nothing like it was 10 years ago, in fact, a significant portion of my Facebook feed is "remember 5-10 years ago".
> Are people still using Facebook in 2026?
Some of the best B2C customers are on FB — willing to spend, low expectations, low maintenance.
If you add IG to the mix, it’s even better.
Your typical HNer does not really fall into “ideal customer” profile for most B2C businesses. Our saving grace is our above average income profile. Other than that, on average we are tolerated rather than sought after (imho).
So basically the suckers stayed?
Facebook marketplace has completely taken over the used sales business in my area (Pacific Northwest). Craigslist is dead, offer up is dead, FB marketplace won.
is this still really the case? I feel like Facebook Marketplace has been significantly more dead than even last year. and it definitely seems completely dead for things like rental listings.
It is huge around Seattle. Nothing else exists for selling goods. There are also private sales groups on FB as well for specialized interests, including illicit home meal delivery services. It seemed like shef.com was going to enter that space and win it but they seemingly abandoned parts of it and pivoted primarily towards weekly Indian meals. Sad, they used to have some amazing West African food.
It's become a defacto forum for a lot of local niche stuff like clubs, schools, non profits, and other special interest groups.
In my area there are groups related to a lot of different outdoor activities , and they share information, trip reports, etc. There might be some other forums for that, but they aren't as widely used or frequently updated.
Yes, though it is much reduced.
I might look at my feed* perhaps 2-3 times a week; despite this, there's a good chance only one of my friends has posted anything new. Unfortunately, that particular friend is also a fairly cliché left-of-the-Cuban-Communist-Party (no, seriously) activist and 95% of her posts are "signal boosting" things I, a Brit living in Germany, do not have any connection to, e.g. "Demexit memes" or Bernie Sander's opinions about anything.
Doesn't help that this trillion dollar corporation still can't handle rotation metadata*, so if I see something and I want to share it, even if it's a good fit for my feed, 50% chance the pic looks stupid the moment I've uploaded it, to which I respond "ugh, never mind then" and forget about trying to solve this and don't post it.
* though the messenger app's web view
I just created my account so I can buy/sell gunplas
> Are people still using Facebook in 2026?
I know this is meant as rhetorical snark, but facebook is by far the most popular social network on the planet, so it just sounds silly.
You're right. But there's a generational aspect to this too.
Younger generations won't touch Facebook. It's seen as a platform for "old" people. So Facebook is on a modest decline. (Enter Instagram and Tiktok and all that to fill the void...)
Younger western generations perhaps. 3 billion people use Facebook still.
This is a myth. Unless people in their 20s are now considered old.
It doesn't sound silly and Facebook is definitely not as relevant as it was 10 years ago.
The data indicates this is just objectively wrong. So yeah, it's silly to suggest people aren't using the most popular social media site in the world.
Your own data indicates that Facebook is as relevant as ever? Show that to meta they would love it!
I purposely don't use mine. They keep shadow profiles on you, if you're in IL you can sue them (there already was a lawsuit about it) and get some money from them.
I completely agree. I did this many years ago. The only thing that annoys me is that for many local things it’s the only option. I’m actually significantly less informed and involved in the local community because things are so heavily reliant on Facebook, and I refuse to sign back up.
I left Facebook over a decade ago, and it was painful to realize how many people simply forgot that I exist, and how many events I missed because many people exclusively use it to invite people.
Similar experience where I met someone in 2017 and was enraptured with them, and we eventually drifted apart because they only communicated through Snapchat and Instagram.
I often wonder if abstaining from the platforms that I dislike was worth the increase in loneliness and detachment from society, but I don't have access to the alternative universe where I decided to grit my teeth and accept the data hoarding companies and dark patterns as a tradeoff for being able to interact with people who couldn't care less about the technicalities.
I think, if someone refuses to interact with you unless it's over their preferred corporate advertising-delivery platform, then they really aren't your friend. Real friends are willing to put in effort and at least agree on a least common denominator communication channel!
My friends know I am not on Facebook. If they really want me to invite me to an event, they know how to reach me, and they do. Anything being communicated out only on Facebook, I just don't go to, and I probably wouldn't want to go to it anyway.
I've been off of Facebook for so long, I don't even remember when I quit. At least 10 years ago, probably 15. And I never joined Instagram, TikTok, or any of these other ad-delivery platforms. I don't feel that I am any more lonely or more detached from society because of it.
it is how it is, but nothing's stopping any of us from reaching out or calling a friend or sending a calendar invite. I used Facebook for a local animal shelter I was volunteering at, but from the infinite scroll filled with infinite ads, very little local things in the middle using "FB Purity" firefox addon to hide all the garbage you see how much garbage is actually there. it feels like I pulled away from a dark matrix of things designed to keep us hooked, then I look around and see everybody else hooked, commenting with bots, sharing facebook encouraging memes/new age spirituality posts and fb doing all it could to hook everybody's attention, getting riled up against political opinions, bots.
is the loneliness worth it? probably not. is the freedom? yes.
> where I decided to grit my teeth and accept the data hoarding companies and dark patterns as a tradeoff for being able to interact with people who couldn't care less about the technicalities.
I know, right? that infinite scroll/showing all the good things on the timelines isn't their real life, they're filling a void within themselves surfing short videos and voicing opinions on nearly everything.
even Zuckerberg said Facebook isn't for making/interacting with friends anymore, it's other things, and not good things.
you're not alone, and you're not detached from society, you're just unplugged from the matrix. of course I say this while browsing subreddits and hn, but hobbies and activities where we meet people, these are always going to be the best thing available to us. in the digital world there's plenty of people who'd be down for a LAN, a hangout, an event like going hiking, and I've met some cool people outside of social media but there's many days where it was me, 4 walls, a book/finding things to occupy my time.
trust me you did yourself a solid.
What's fun is how many things they lock behind a "fuck you, sign in to read this" popup (and now Instagram too)
This from the same company that conveniently tends to reset privacy settings on posts
(It ought to be possible to access info as a non-user, but you can't, so they force you to sign up)
They globally reset the privacy settings for pretty entertaining reasons. Every few years a post goes around saying crazy privacy things that gives you instructions to change your privacy settings to only “share with yourself”. If you’re dumb enough to do it, you basically shadow-ban yourself. If enough people do it, they have to change the settings back because also those same people will complain about their aunt/neighbor/dad/sister whatever not being able to see their posts and have no idea why.
I just honestly feel Zuck's lost the benefit of the doubt but I'm willing to be proven wrong
Unfortunately this monopolistic cancer has become the only way for businesses to get to their customers.
My first question in 2026. Why does such company is allowed to exist and harm society?
Because companies have only existed for a few hundred years and we still haven't caught up with the idea of making things they do illegal. We tend to pass responsibility to the people who make up the company, rather than the corporation, but the people have gotten pretty good at making it impossible to assign blame to any individual. And you can't cost the owners (shareholders), because of course none of them are at fault, either.
Who at Meta is responsible for posting scam ads? Nobody. But Meta isn't responsible, either. So some executive makes a halfhearted promise to do something about it, but without any accountability.
The "limited liability" was just supposed to be for debts, but it turned out to be good for laundering responsibility, too. Originally, corporations had fixed term charters. And it might be worth looking at that again.
We need to start holding executives accountable for things going on in their companies, and go as far as holding board members, and if its an external company then hold them accountable as well, and their board members. Just go all the way on accountability to the point where it becomes hard to mess around because someone will freak out. I wonder how many "save my skin" whistleblowers we will see at the executive level if everyone at the top of a company can be held liable for stuff like this, that goes on for over a decade. Its pretty obvious Facebook KNOWS there's fraud, but they willfully do nothing, harming consumers everywhere.
What you would see is firms divesting from companies that do this to save their own skins too, so funds would dry up if they don't remediate it.
Liability is the answer to a lot of problems or lack of liability is the cause. Online BS can be solved if platforms were liable. Corporate BS can be solved if the humans at the top are liable.
My issue is you have to do it correctly, there's an insane amount of nuance involved, but the world could be fixed heavily by making more people liable, and big hedge fund investors just as liable.
Unfortunately the fabric of our society has started unraveling and 2026 is the year where predatory business models and abusive monopolies dominate
Because money.
Because it is based in US.
The original source is from Reuters article [0].
It is profoundly ironic that Meta is apparently using cloaking techniques against regulators. Cloaking is a black-hat technique where you show one version of a landing page to the ad review bot (e.g., a blog about health) and a different version to the actual user (e.g., a diet pill scam).
Meta has spent years building AI to detect when affiliates cloak their links. Now, according to this report, Meta is essentially cloaking the ads themselves from journalists and regulators by likely filtering based on user profiling, IP ranges, or behavioral signals. They are using the sophisticated targeting tools intended for advertisers to target the "absence" of scrutiny.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook...
"First, they identified the top keywords and celebrity names that Japanese Ad Library users employed to find the fraud ads. Then they ran identical searches repeatedly, deleting ads that appeared fraudulent from the library and Meta’s platforms."
That doesn't sound like cloaking. They really are deleting the ads. They're just concentrating on the ads that the regulators are most likely to see based on what they usually search for.
> The scrubbing, Meta teams explained in documents regarding their efforts to reduce scam discoverability, sought to make problematic content “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists.”
This seems to be the "smoking gun"... but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
> “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists.”
> but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
Good point, this quote could just be painting their actions in the poorest possible light.
Needs verification on the normal user side of the experience. Like noted, unclear whether the ads are completely deleted, or just deleted from what regulators would return in search results.
Later part makes it sounds like the ads were at least deleted from the Japanese / Taiwan results areas completely, and then just redistributed to other geographic areas.
However, still difficult to tell from the story what the experience of "normal" Japanese / Taiwan users is relative to what regulators view.Notably, from a different article about fake accounts, and how much they cost, Japan's regulation seems to be working (at least somewhat). [1] Fake Accounts for Facebook Available (US, 157,401, @$0.13/account; Japan, 16, @$3.00/account, Dec 31st, 2025 data)
[1] https://cotsi.org/platforms?view=map&platform=fb
Not quite. The ads themselves aren't deleted but only not displayed for a subset of keywords. If the ads were deleted no keyword would be able to show these.
If there are multiple ads (and why would there not be multiple ads?), deleting the one advertised using keyword X does nothing to the one advertised using keyword Y.
So there's Dieselgate for Meta as there is Dieselgate for Honey
Both are American companies, not like VW, so not much will happen
What does this have to do with them being American? You do realize nothing much happened to VW in Europe, I hope.
VW executives went to prison:
https://qz.com/dieselgate-sentences-handed-down-1851782440
I do not yet know if there's wrongdoing here, but even if it was screaming bad, all US government enforcement bodies have been gutted and made completely subservient to the will of the president rather than their legislatively mandated mission, under a novel "unitary executive" philosophy.
Further, that unitary executive is completely corrupt, and has already been paid off by Meta. Ukraine is a model of clean government with proper anti-corruption investigations and teeth compared to the US.
Jail time [0] and billions of dollars in fines is “nothing much?”
0: https://apnews.com/article/volkswagen-germany-diesel-emissio...
Those billions are because of the USA. In the EU, it was merely a slap in the hand.
Annual revenue of VW at the time was 217B €. In the EU, they paid 1.5B €. So, 0.7% of their annual revenue for a scheme that went on for years.
Granted, in the US, they actually did persecute VW properly, and they ended up paying close to 30B $. A much proper sum.
As for the jail time, they arrested 2 from middle management in the EU. No member from the board or the CEO went to jail here.
Is that what we call justice now? Specially when we want to pretend we are superior to the USA in that regard?
The crime was committed in the USA.
You are expecting third party countries to begin litigation on crimes that happen outside of their borders - even if they're not even strictly illegal where they're headquartered?
That shit never happens, and if it would, you'd first have to start jailing lots of S&P CEOs for the companies crimes that are committed in other countries and never amount to anything, precisely for the same reason.
Like literally every company thats involved in any mining, drilling etc. They always don't adhere to local environmental regulations etc
> The crime was committed in the USA.
What? No, you are completely wrong. The crime was committed in many places. In the USA, but also in several EU countries (Germany included).
In fact, the numbers were more than 10x higher in the EU (since we use a lot more diesel cars) than what they were in the USA.
600 000 vehicles were affected in the USA, while 8.5 million vehicles were affected in the EU.
USA courts, effectively, issued a fine more than 200x higher per vehicle affected, than what we did in the EU.
No one that actually followed the news (and isn't German and therefore completely biased) will say with a straight face that EU justice system didn't favor VW due to established interests. The German government obviously manipulated the judicial system all over Europe to let the case go away.
It also says a lot, that it had to be the Americans bringing the case to light. A lot of people probably knew, but the control that the Germans had (and still have) over European economy and judicial systems didn't allow anyone inside the EU to speak up.
No justice was made over here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
The American Justice system. Many no longer trust in its willingness and ability to enforce the rule of law.
Not to mention Uber's little program to detect whether a rider was likely to be law/code enforcement in cities where there were restrictions on Uber operations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838
Not sure why this only seems to happen with IG ads, but I've noticed twice already that i'll purchase something on IG for a fixed price, and it will automatically enroll me into a monthly subscription plan without any chance to cancel it. Further, the subscription can then not be cancelled without email interaction -- no web-based cancellation.
The checkout screen had no mention of a subscription or any cost of a subscription, so not even sure how this is legal.
It has not gotten to the point where I dont make any purchase via IG. I'll independently search for the product and purchase it (usually less expensively via Amazon.com).
Not sure how this is good for IG, because the attribution is then not matched on the purchase. Further, not sure how this is even good for the merchant, since I'll inevitably have to do a chargeback.
How much more scammy and illegal behavior must we tolerate from Meta before anyone thinks of putting that Zuck behind bars?
No one will go to jail. The fee will cost less than they profited. Crime is defective legal, there's just a toll.
Easy solution: Don't patronize Meta.
Nobody can figure this out for some reason
They made $16 BILLION last year off of them. Screw your parents and grandparents that get scammed out of their life savings, Meta has to make money.
[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838
Gavin Belson would never suggest scrubbing negative mentions of Hooli from the internet.
I posted in the other thread but in case that no longer has traction I will repeat my question here:
I'm still wondering what the Scam Prevention Framework enacted in Australia will do to mitigate this kind of stuff.
https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdb/au/legis/cth/conso... (Part IVF)
3 or 4 years ago I tried Google Adwords to see if I could gain new customers. I admit I had a niche business, it was already successful, but I had read prior about certain tech companies overcharging - - or not cancelling services after you requested, so I opted to use only pre-paid credit cards bought at my local drug store. I chose $200 limit per card. That lasted for about 1.5 to 2 years, several times Google emailed me that my card expired or ran out of $$, and I needed to correct the error. That's when I bought another pre-paid card for a limit of $200 and funded my acct again. I never noticed any uptick in customers contacting me from my websites.
Eventually Google shut down the ability to use pre-paid credit cards (it came back an error when I attempted to enter the new card no) and that's when I closed my account. Their response was too obvious evidence <Goggle in conspiracy with the ad click bots> desired the ability to scam my account and one day I would check my email and get a $5,000 bill.
There is a rather obvious "conflict of interest" when you have to dispute a charge with your credit card provider knowing that the credit card co is fully aware they only make their "cut" if the charge goes through.
Prepaid credit cards tend to be a very common fraud vector (very similar to gift card scams).
For chargebacks, the merchant has to pay at least a $15 fee on every chargeback, regardless of the outcome of the result. It's why many merchants prefer for you to contact them and ask for a refund rather than going through the chargeback process. For small purchases, merchants tend to just refund rather than dealing with an angry customer that's going to charge back.
On the other hand, prepaid credit cards seem to be one of the only ways to prevent merchants from "running up" the charges on a customers account. Sure, a customer can go through the dispute process but it's quite a hassle. Just "limiting the amount of money you place on the table" is quite effective. Giving a merchant your credit card with say a $5,000 or more available balance seems like insanity, like laying out 50 of $100 bills on the table: "here, go ahead, can I trust you to take only what you should" ? I would pay extra to have a VISA or MC credit card that only offers say a $200 limit, just for dubious situations, but again, providers have a "conflict of interest" in that they only make their "cut" when the charges go through, so the more and the larger the charges - - the more "cut" they obtain.
A prepaid card doesn't prevent you from being liable for a bill. This is like how leaving your wallet at home when you visit a resteraunt doesn't entitle you to free food because they don't charge you up front.
No but it significantly raises the effort for collecting said money. The company would need to have a strong case (that they need to be able to defend in court if necessary) to do it.
No scummy company relying on dark patterns/etc to charge the customer without their consent will dare potentially airing this dirty laundry in front of a judge.
I consider it immoral to dodge paying bills just because you can get away with it. This is like saying it's okay to shoplift because a store may not think it's worth it to go through the legal process to come after you.
I adjust my morals to match those of the entity I'm dealing with. I have no problems "stealing" from a company who is trying to steal money from me by sneaking in unexpected charges.
Nextgrid hit the nail on the head. If you are being an honest customer, but a company is attempting to "blackmail" you into paying bogus or "run up" charges like Google Adwords, which multiple reports indicate they are more than 70% bot generated hits, you can sue them in your local jurisdiction, here we have justice of the peace, small claims, force the big corp to hire local counsel. Do they want to take it higher ? Taunt them with "dumping discovery on them", otherwise known as a far reaching motion for discovery, they'll be forced to deliver a tractor trailer load of paper . . .
With all due respect, historically, the guy with the greenbacks holds the upper hand in any deal. Many abide by the rule: “The customer is always right”.
Internet merchants often with unrealistic low pricing to “bait you” are attempting to sway the balance in their favor by cutting corners, eliminating posting a telephone number answered promptly by a live human being, too often sending out “one way” do-not-reply emails, which is shameful. Recently I encountered a tactic whereby a large corporate health care company would ONLY discuss matters over a phone call, so unless you were recording the conversation (and provide proper legal notice of such at beginning of call) there was no record of the conversation (now internet providers like Spectrum are doing the same). In fact, they were attempting to force me to sign a 30+ page contract full of legalese and “boilerplate” in their doscusign pdf format which coincidentally disallows one from modifying or typing in any disclaimers within the signature line. They refused over multiple communications to respond to several of my questions regarding costs and any future billing. I finally just stonewalled them by saying I would only communicate via email so there would be a written record.
I can regularly obtain a live human on the phone with Amazon and have always received a favorable response - - - obviously Amazon values their reputation. I personally will not do business with any company that fails to provide a telephone number answered promptly by a live human. Often I buy locally from brick and mortar shops with return policies in the event the product doesn't hold up to expectations. The somewhat higher prices I pay at brick and mortar are just “added insurance” that doesn't even compare to the serious disappointment or anger one experiences from some internet purchases where the seller sent a fake or missing GPU card, or the item coming from China has no reasonable cost of shipping it back “hoping” for a refund, or even a US merchant who refuses to honor a valid return. Now that memory prices have exploded, I expect to see even more of these fake or missing GPU shipments from online sellers.
Having been a former cc merchant, I know that any merchant that receives a chargeback will suffer at least a $35 hit, plus more on the time and effort to respond and fight the chargeback, indeed I encourage all buyers to challenge any that we discover dishonest. Merchants getting enough chargebacks will suffer the company providing the merchant account cancelling their business merchant account, often the merchants are are then “blacklisted” in the cc industry.
The original reuters article quotes Meta as claiming that making them harder to find by removing them from the system. This article doesn't offer any evidence to suggest that Meta is lying. This is lazy and poor reporting as far as I'm concerned.
The issue as I see it is that these searches are run when testers look for them, not on a regular basis. If Facebook can detect them, why let them be displayed in the first place?
Reuters: Restaurant hides unsanitary waste from food inspectors by hiding it in dumpster.
Restaurant seen throwing waste in dumpster after removing it from food inspector's plate. Insists there's no other waste on other plates, apparently without checking.
What proportion of the scam ads do you think this approach caught?
I'm not sure, but starting with the ads that appear with most popular searches isn't a bad idea per se. It's a bit like sending law enforcement to protect popular areas.
>Restaurant seen throwing waste in dumpster after removing it from food inspector's plate. Insists there's no other waste on other plates, apparently without checking.
That seems... kinda reasonable?
Health inspector: "hey it looks like your ice machine is dirty, and you're not keeping foods at a hot enough temperature"
Restaurant: "ok we'll clean our ice machines more carefully and install thermometers to monitor the temperature of our hot trays"
Journalist: "Restaurant made health violations harder to find instead of removing them!"
Would it be better if the restaurant was proactively fixing issues before the health inspector brought it up? Yes. Does it make sense to imply that the restaurant was acting maliciously by making health violations "harder to find"? No.
Regulators can't verify every single Facebook ad. So, they take a sample. Facebook is creating a Potemkin village - trying to provide a clean sample. It suggests they don't believe that a wider sample would pass muster.
It's more like if the health inspector found e coli in the spaghetti, so Facebook threw out the spaghetti then said "trust us, you don't need to check the macaroni, it's fine."
That sounds funny, until you realize that there are people who pull ingredients from the waste bin if they still look "good enough". At least one restaurant chain owner in germany was banned from entering his own restaurants after he was caught on camera instructing his staff to do just that, apparently only one instance of a long chain of food safety violations his "frugal" business practices caused.
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