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Comment by jrmg | Hacker News Reader

It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.

In the USA I’m pretty sure advertising scams - even the more ‘benign’ ones like claiming a product does something it doesn’t do or lying about its efficiency - are illegal. There’s just no - or not nearly enough - enforcement.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising

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There's no meaningful difference in my mind between "there are no laws" and "there are technically laws but they're completely unenforced".

There's a lot of that going around in the US these days.

And everywhere else, honestly. It's not like banner ads on the web are particularly honest here in the EU/EEA.

I was referring specifically to, "laws not being enforced".

Both the EU and various EU/EEA members have laws related to misleading advertising on the books which seemingly aren't being enforced either.

Whoosh.

You're gonna have to explain yourself, because I'm not getting it.

The difference in the comments here and in this other thread are interesting :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45424888

(US infocoms, and Google in particular, aren't reputable companies any more. Ban them all.)

*no enforcement any longer. Back when we had Lina Khan at the FTC, she would have enforced it. Now we have a scammer-in-chief only enforcing laws against his political opponents

She started enforcing it against the most egregious offenders, but for every enforcement action, there were thousands that went unpunished. The problem is that FTC proceedings are very process heavy by design, which is what you want in some cases, but doesn't scale to widespread scam. We need to be prosecuting hundreds of thousands these cases every year if we want to make a dent and turn things around to fraud being a rare exception rather than a normal business model.

I agree the current administration is way worse than the previous one in almost every respect, but to argue that the previous one would’ve enforced this particular thing is obviously untrue.

The situation’s been like this for a few years now.

Not fake ads, but Biden's FTC did go after fake reviewers and fake reviews: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-ftc-fina...

If she had had more time, I could see Khan going after fake ads as well. There's nothing to me that suggests that she was deliberately ignoring fraudulent ads when she was extremely pro-consumer in nearly every other policy.

Agreed - I think it’s lack of resources. Congress would need to act to fix this.

It's not even that there's no enforcement... you could talk to your state's AG. But their budgets aren't infinite, and the scammers are overseas as likely as not. Unless the scam rises above some (absurdly high) threshold or threatens someone very important/wealthy, it's going to be back-burnered.

The cost of enforcement would break every government's budget. The cost asymmetry is the problem.

Budget is not the issue. When a crime is hard to police all you need to do is up the fines and other punishment so whatever enforcement you can afford acts as a deterrent for the rest.

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