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Comment by nsagent | Hacker News Reader

Went to watch the Youtube intro [1] for Penguin Mail and was greeted by the most egregious scam video. Didn't click the ad, but simply went to the domain (usbest1.com) and it's just chock full of AI generated content hoping to scam you out of your money. Going through the checkout flow, it even asks you if you want to tip your driver (presumably for delivery).

Sorry for the off-topic, but Google (and all ad networks) should be legally required to vet their advertisers. That's gotta be the worst I've seen.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PyJCsw1FSE

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Amazed anyone here isnt using an ad blocker for youtube tbh, it feel like the first thing you'd want to avoid the mess.

Ublock is still a thing. Or use Brave as thats got baked in ad blocking which can be combined with ublock to make it even more effective. Then adguard or pihole on your local network so no analytics/tracking data is still being pushed out.

Interestingly, one of Poland’s wealthiest individuals (who has been the target of scams ranging from malicious to macabre) is now engaged in an openly declared war with Meta[1][2]. There is an entire foundation dedicated to tracking ads and identifying scams; they calculate the profits generated from these schemes and lobby for regulations that would mandate the vetting of advertisers, recently on an EU level.

[^1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-27/-locker-k... [^2]: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/polish-minister-accuses-meta...

Well if the rich finally decided less ads was better who are we to argue? Hopefully we can have a "I AM RICH" category on the Internet so corporations can keep targetting us with ads while sparing the poor rich people.

Well, in his case it was more of very visual fake news that he was dead, or handcuffed and arrested. Also while it started personal, at some point became an issue of “if a billionaire with positive rulings of a court and other govt institutions cannot win, who can”. Now he’s more on a crusade to stop scam on SoMe in general, not only to remove the ones about him.

Protect yourself and your family. Use an adblocker.

I need to update that intro, that's how the app started, it's very different now.

I use Penguin as my daily driver, and I made it exactly because of what I was missing on other mail clients, but idea after idea brought me here to share it with everyone, my intentions are to continue development and not keep it stale or let it die, there are loads of things i want to add but I also don't want to lose any stability, a nice balance is what I'm looking for

Again, really sorry to derail the conversation. What you've created looks amazing! I do typical use the command line for mail (mblaze), but I'd certainly consider giving your client a spin if I wasn't on macOS.

Just to make it clear for anyone quickly scanning; this is YouTube being shady, NOT Penguin Mail.

I went through a phase of reporting them (to YouTube, there's a button while playing to do so) and did get automated reply that a lot were removed. Some took several reports, others they continued to insist didn't violate their policies, but they will remove them.

YouTube has some seriously scammy ads. To an extent that these ads have motivated me to buy premium for my parents as they tend to fall into the trap of fake dialog boxes shown in ads warning a PDF app needing an update.

Install an adblocker instead.

Especially now these scam videos can be made on an industrial scale.

Ublock origin

How do you gather it's a scam? It seems like a genuine Chinese seller selling alibaba/temu/whatever nonsense? Not that I would buy any of it but doesn't look like the descriptions are scammy?

The hero pictures look AI generated yes but the individual products look like "normal TEMU"?

The ad was for a 32TB portable SSD for $200...

https://wccftech.com/customer-buys-32tb-external-hard-drives...

Ah. That is nonsense of course.

On the shop itself that you linked though I don't see any unreasonable price (or any SSD for that matter). Just normal TEMU-level stuff with appropriate prices.

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