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Comment by VFIT7CTO77TOC | Hacker News Reader

It is infuriating that Google seems to be doing nothing about scam ads. For years I have been seeing "Click to install iPhone update!!!" ads on YouTube mobile. Easy to have huge profit margins when your company hires no humans to do things like customer support and ad vetting.

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There's been a series of malware distribution ads pretending to be blender.org popping up at the top of Google results on and off for months.

1 month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/109yjxm/dont_click...

2 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/zewem3/beware_of_p...

4 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/xxkx5s/warning_som...

7 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/vuqu1r/hey_so_what...

Pretty sad state of affairs that Google can't or won't stop this, especially since they gradually redesigned the ads spots to look practically identical to the search results. Be very careful clicking anything on Google's search results.

And fraudulent nutritional supplements.

And weird speech-synthesied rousing music: ‘Jim worked for a big electronics manufacturer, and had an idea. <Electronic item>s for the people. They they wouldn’t let him make it. They stole his idea and made a bad version. Now Jim is making <Electronic item>s himself that are twice as good and only a quarter the cost! Buy one to support Jim and stick it to the big evil corporation!”. How did that get to be a genre?

And “buy my video course to learn how to make thousands of dollars a day!” scams.

I find it frankly astounding how much obviously fraudulent advertising there is. Isn’t it illegal? Is there no authority that police’s it?

I get so so many of these speech-synthesized "Don't buy solar panels! You can get them for free!" scam ads.

The big "DOWNLOAD NOW" ads placed on webpages for software downloads are pretty bad too. Whenever I'm setting up a fresh windows machine I haven't grabbed an adblocker yet and am not used to seeing ads so they get me every now and then.

The number of times I had to yell at family members to NOT CLICK THAT ITS AN AD is maddening. It required getting a pretty nasty virus and a complete wipe to actually convince my dad to install adblock.

The download sites also make the correct arrow smaller and harder to spot so you click on the ad. I was thinking this today: the last thing a download page wants is for you to be successful and download the thing and then f-off

Yea, I think we can all conclude they just don't care if it effects their bottom line. So short-sighted. About a month ago people in the AMD subreddit were complaining about compromised drivers and software appearing as the #1 search results due to these kind of ads.

I still get ads for Slovenian brides on YouTube. Not only is it incredibly gross and objective to me, Google clearly knows nothing about my demographic.

I still see extreme right wing propaganda on a pristine profile on YouTube’s flipping homepage. I would love to use expletives on the YT management right now, but I refrain.

Google are literally profiting from the promotion of malware and scams, resultant from the business decision to reduce human interaction within the process.

It's gross.

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