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Comment by rsweeney21 | Hacker News Reader

I work for Meta. Do you have any examples of this on Meta platforms? (Facebook/Instagram?)

I haven't been able to confirm with any certainty that Meta enforces domain ownership verification but I would love to see a confirmation that Meta does indeed do this or plans to do so in the future.

If Meta's advertising network does not enforce domain ownership verification, then it is fundamentally vulnerable to the same problem described on this blog post.

Sampled URL resolution cannot prove anything about a URL.

rsweeney21: give this man some test ad credits

I'd rather Meta just clearly stated if they require domain ownership verification when spoofing links. Lack of this (or similarly effective) protection mechanism enables automated link fraud.

Reminder for adtech company employees in this thread: If you suspect a crime has taken place (e.g. if you have seen internal documentation showing that potential profit outweighed the security benefit of actually enforcing a policy), you can blow the whistle to regulators.

The person you were replying to probably does not know the answer. They can probably route you to the right person once you know though.

Maybe have them look at how many "Breastfeeding" videos I get on FB. Seriously, I hardly ever log-in anymore, but when I do and no matter how much I report or "hide" that content, I keep getting it. It looks to be link/page farms from Asia and India that create them with generic sounding names.

Yes, not link fraud but pure, unadulaterated self-promo spam in IG comments along the lines of "I subscribed to this account and no regrets, it's all I need! Laughs every day!" constantly pinned at the top.

I do also see the occasional Bitcoin links and other linkspam on IG as well.

Edit: Dear downvoters, is this a threat to your precious growth hack, or?

You're being downvoted because your complaint is unrelated to the post topic. It's about scam ads masquerading as linked to trusted domains (an ad that shows it links to "adobe.com", but actually takes you to scamsite.com when you click it).

FWIW, I downvoted because of the complaint about downvotes.

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