Every year, online advertising services like Facebook, Google and others show billions of individual ads to users across the web. While most ads people see on your favorite websites are safe and legitimate, there are scammers that try to “game the system” to find ways to exploit consumers by getting harmful and deceptive ads published on reputable websites. In many cases, these ads – on the surface – appear normal and harmless, but may surreptitiously redirect a person to webpages that can install malware to a computer or mobile devices, direct them to scam or phishing websites, or try to sell them counterfeit goods. Some have asked, “How can bad ads appear on these and other sites?”
It’s a good question, says TrustInAds.org whose member companies are AOL, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo. They admit it’s an ‘ever-evolving fight’.
You can report an online advert that may be harmful or deceptive (such as offering discounted clothing or other goods that when bought turn out to be sub-par) at – http://trustinads.org/report-a-bad-ad/.
For reports on tech support scams and false claims of sellers of weight-loss products, visit – http://trustinads.org/resources/.
Google reported that last year, the company (globally) disabled 524 million ads and banned more than 214,000 advertisers. Google says that it banned nearly 7,000 advertisers promoting counterfeit goods; a sharp decline from previous years (14,000 in 2013; 82,000 in 2012).
Vikaram Gupta, Director, Ads Engineering, at Google wrote: “This is a constantly evolving fight. Bad actors continually create more sophisticated systems and scams, so we too are continually evolving our practices, technology, and methodology in fighting these bad ads.”
