#click fraud google ads

[clicksbuster]

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With so many options available, selecting the best click fraud protection for your business can be overwhelming. Our comprehensive guide breaks down the key features to look for, including real-time monitoring, customizable settings, and robust reporting. Make an informed decision and protect your business from click fraud.

[hndsolutions]

Don't let sneaky clicks drain your Google Ads budget. Learn how to identify, prevention strategies & how to request refunds for invalid clicks to maximize your campaign performance

[softtrixtechsolution]

Which are the most effective techniques for detecting click fraud? | Google Ads Fraud | Click Fraud

Learn the most efficient click fraud detection strategies 🛡️! Learn how to use proven tactics to protect your online campaigns and optimize ROI.

[joinstratosphere]

PPC ad campaigns play a crucial role in bringing clients to your insurance company, so it’s crucial to prevent click frauds on your PPC campaign. Here are crucial points to know to avoid becoming a victim of click fraud while running a successful ad campaign. Learn more: https://www.joinstratosphere.com/blog/how-insurance-agencies-can-prevent-click-fraud-on-ppc-ads

[beesmygod]

in an astounding twist of fate, im looking into what is actually going on with google adsense. they're in hot fucking water right now actually.

this summer, an enormous and scathing review by adalytics (an independent media research website) came out criticizing google for a myriad of things which could be politely summed up as "fraud". we're talking like. theye were taking money to serve ads on pages that got 0 views regularly. thats not what people pay for lol.

as a result google mysteriously issued some refunds (""credits"", because "refunds" sounds bad) but insists it was all normal. adexchanger has a summary of an adage.com article

Google vehemently denies the report’s findings and that the credits are in any way related. “Issuing credits to advertisers is not uncommon,” a Google spokesperson says, adding that “Adalytics used a flawed methodology to make wildly inaccurate claims about GVP.”

so over the last four or so months, google has been making core updates to its adsense network with, apparently, very little warning to the people using it. and everyone's numbers tanked. hard. oct 2023 appears to have been esp brutal. both the search engine journal and lily ray from amsive, apparently a huge name in marketing, released reports that are completely nuts. the lily ray one is esp detailed and has a timeline of updates

73% of overall respondents indicated that they have seen their Google Discover traffic drop to 0 during the past 3 months. Among websites that lost Discover traffic, the most common complaints were dramatic traffic declines; dropping to 0 impressions and clicks; extreme percentage decreases in clicks ranging from 50-99%, and massive losses in revenue from AdSense and other ad networks.

50 to 99%?! yeah that's a small sample size but that's a fucking hell of a swing and a trend.

according to the search engine journal google appears to be saying "well, we''ll see what we can do" the same way that you would say "let me look in the back" when you know full and well its not in the back. like this reads to me as "them's the breaks". which is uhh. i think a really big problem.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]

[vavuska]

I thought this one would be just another developer of mobile game that use The Sims 4 contents in its (fake) ads to fraud users by making people belive it is its game, when it has a completely different gameplay.

Unfortunately, Room Makover by FlyBird Casual Games is much more than this.

Room Makover has plenty of false ads. This time I actually tried the game, because the pictures and videos on Google Play were cute and I decided to give it a try.

I was so naive. Happens that the whole page on Google Play is full of fake contents.

It's just one of those mobile games in which you have to match and remove nails. Every time you pass a level, you will rewarded with bills that you can use to unlock part of a building under "makeover". You have just three option for every part of the building or the room to choose between.

There is nothing creative. Not actual building or cluttering rooms or decoring.

As, always, since I'm a curious little bitch, I decided to dig further into this FlyBird Casual Game and... Oh. God. Their site looks even less legit than LUCKY FORTUNE GAMES' one!

It is just a void page. There is nothing here. NOTHING. The only two working section are the privacy and conditions of use, in which they try to convince you that they didn't have any liability for damages or fraud committed.

The privacy one is curious, because mentions this Commissioner's Office in UK and a long list of partners. Both for ads and for data collection, which is hugely uncommon for this kind of games.

Sooooo... In this magical list of apps, I noticed a few tech nightmares, which I will explain briefly here:

Aarki is an AI company that builds advertising solutions to drive mobile revenue growth. Traslated from bullshit: they use AI to generate fake ads and sells it to shady corps.

Blind Ferret is the big deal here! Not only gave you digital marketing solutions, data collection and analytics, but also pays influencers and product placement on social media to promote the game and, hear me out, CREATE fake ads too! It's literally written in their site: "Our Creative Services don’t just make things look pretty. Our team uses data to guide us! How do we make brands shine? By turning the arts into a numbers game with top-performing creative content." This include: Graphic Design, Illustration, 2D Animation, Video Editing and Composition, Copywriting and conceptualizing.

InMobi is a big Corp that does native advertising, which means promoted contents, collabs with influencers, etc.

Ironsource. This one is a fucking cancer. IronSource Ltd. is an Israeli software company that focuses on developing technologies for app monetization and distribution, with its core production focused on the app economy. That would sound harmless, but Samsung use it in its budget and midrange smartphone to install multiple third-party apps during the set-up process. This platform slips bloatware on the pretext of recommended apps, leading to apps clutter and reduction in on-board storage space. The only purpose it exists on Samsung phones is to download games without your consent with no way to remove it (no app installed).

Mintegral is another fucking tech nightmare. Not only poses serious threats to your privacy and datas, but also uses malicious codes to spy your activity and when you seem intentioned to install a mobile app, Mintegral’s software would then fire off fake clicks on non-existent ads to claim credit for the install and essentially collect a bounty from app publishers who pay ad networks to promote their apps.

Mistplay is one of those "play to earn bucks" that I find very very dangerous. Because YOUR data are their revenue.

Tapjoy does monetization of ads and also surveys, that force users to download one from a long list of games, download it and playing for hours or since it is gained some in-game prize. This surveys are rewarded with credits and user can spend on the mobile game they actually want to play. Tapjoy has a huge market among IMVU users, who need credits to buy piece of clothing and accessories for their avi.

The other apps do mobile app marketing, using data collection that allow shady corps to target more gullable and naive people to scam. Plus they do also monetization surveys to earn money and at the same time forcefully grow the engagement of this shady corps.

Obviously, there is no user support mail listed in their Google Play page, but at least this has a contact mail listed on their website: flybirdgames2022@gmail.com

As always, stay safe and please tell me if you know more about everything above or know the person who create this build first.

Help people to stay safe.

Thank you.

<<< previous Coloring app uses design of The Sims 4 builds without the consent of the creators and other mobile developers steal TS4 speed build contents and claim it's the actual gameplay of their mobile game.

[mariacallous]

In today’s digital world, injustice lurks in the shadows of the Facebook post that’s delivered to certain groups of people at the exclusion of others, the hidden algorithm used to profile candidates during job interviews, and the risk-assessment algorithms used for criminal sentencing and welfare fraud detention. As algorithmic systems are integrated into every aspect of society, regulatory mechanisms struggle to keep up.

Over the past decade, researchers and journalists have found ways to unveil and scrutinize these discriminatory systems, developing their own data collection tools. As the internet has moved from browsers to mobile apps, however, this crucial transparency is quickly disappearing.

Third-party analysis of digital systems has largely been made possible by two seemingly banal tools that are commonly used to inspect what’s happening on a webpage: browser add-ons and browser developer tools.

Browser add-ons are small programs that can be installed directly onto a web browser, allowing users to augment how they interact with a given website. While add-ons are commonly used to operate tools like password managers and ad-blockers, they are also incredibly useful for enabling people to collect their own data within a tech platform’s walled garden.

Similarly, browser developer tools were made to allow web developers to test and debug their websites’ user interfaces. As the internet evolved and websites became more complex, these tools evolved too, adding features like the ability to inspect and change source code, monitor network activity, and even detect when a website is accessing your location or microphone. These are powerful mechanisms for investigating how companies track, profile, and target their users.

I have put these tools to use as a data journalist to show how a marketing company logged users’ personal data even before they clicked “submit” on a form and, more recently, how the Meta Pixel tool (formerly the Facebook Pixel tool) tracks users without their explicit knowledge in sensitive places such as hospital websites, federal student loan applications, and the websites of tax-filing tools.

In addition to exposing surveillance, browser inspection tools provide a powerful way to crowdsource data to study discrimination, the spread of misinformation, and other types of harms tech companies cause or facilitate. But in spite of these tools’ powerful capabilities, their reach is limited. In 2023, Kepios reported that 92 percent of global users accessed the internet through their smartphones, whereas only 65 percent of global users did so using a desktop or laptop computer.

Though the vast majority of internet traffic has moved to smartphones, we don’t have tools for the smartphone ecosystem that afford the same level of “inspectability” as browser add-ons and developer tools. This is because web browsers are implicitly transparent, while mobile phone operating systems are not.

If you want to view a website in your web browser, the server has to send you the source code. Mobile apps, on the other hand, are compiled, executable files that you usually download from places such as Apple’s iOS App Store or Google Play. App developers don’t need to publish the source code for people to use them.

Similarly, monitoring network traffic on web browsers is trivial. This technique is often more useful than inspecting source code to see what data a company is collecting on users. Want to know which companies a website shares your data with? You’ll want to monitor the network traffic, not inspect the source code. On smartphones, network monitoring is possible, but it usually requires the installation of root certificates that make users’ devices less secure and more vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks from bad actors. And these are just some of the differences that make collecting data securely from smartphones much harder than from browsers.

The need for independent collection is more pressing than ever. Previously, company-provided tools such as the Twitter API and Facebook’s CrowdTangle, a tool for monitoring what’s trending on Facebook, were the infrastructure that powered a large portion of research and reporting on social media. However, as these tools become less useful and accessible, new methods of independent data collection are needed to understand what these companies are doing and how people are using their platforms.

To meaningfully report on the impact digital systems have on society, we need to be able to observe what’s taking place on our devices without asking a company for permission. As someone who has spent the past decade building tools that crowdsource data to expose algorithmic harms, I believe the public should have the ability to peek under the hood of their mobile apps and smart devices, just as they can on their browsers. And it’s not just me: The Integrity Institute, a nonprofit working to protect the social internet, recently released a report that lays bare the importance of transparency as a lever to achieve public interest goals like accountability, collaboration, understanding, and trust.

To demand transparency from tech platforms, we need a platform-independent transparency framework, something that I like to call an inspectability API. Such a framework would empower even the most vulnerable populations to capture evidence of harm from their devices while minimizing the risk of their data being used in research or reporting without their consent.

An application programming interface (API) is a way for companies to make their services or data available to other developers. For example, if you’re building a mobile app and want to use the phone’s camera for a specific feature, you would use the iOS or Android Camera API. Another common example is an accessibility API, which allows developers to make their applications accessible to people with disabilities by making the user interface legible to screen readers and other accessibility tools commonly found on modern smartphones and computers. An inspectability API would allow individuals to export data from the apps they use every day and share it with researchers, journalists, and advocates in their communities. Companies could be required to implement this API to adhere to transparency best practices, much as they are required to implement accessibility features to make their apps and websites usable for people with disabilities.

In the US, residents of some states can request the data companies collect on them, thanks to state-level privacy laws. While these laws are well-intentioned, the data that companies share to comply with them is usually structured in a way that obfuscates crucial details that would expose harm. For example, Facebook has a fairly granular data export service that allows individuals to see, amongst other things, their “Off-Facebook activity.” However, as the Markup found during a series of investigations into the use of Pixel, even though Facebook told users which websites were sharing data, it did not reveal just how invasive the information being shared was. Doctor appointments, tax filing information, and student loan information were just some of the things that were being sent to Facebook. An inspectability API would make it easy for people to monitor their devices and see how the apps they use track them in real time.

Some promising work is already being done: Apple’s introduction of the App Privacy Report in iOS 15 marked the first time iPhone users could see detailed privacy information to understand each app’s data collection practices and even answer questions such as, “Is Instagram listening to my microphone?”

But we cannot rely on companies to do this at their discretion—we need a clear framework to define what sort of data should be inspectable and exportable by users, and we need regulation that penalizes companies for not implementing it. Such a framework would not only empower users to expose harms, but also ensure that their privacy is not violated. Individuals could choose what data to share, when, and with whom.

An inspectability API will empower individuals to fight for their rights by sharing the evidence of harm they have been exposed to with people who can raise public awareness and advocate for change. It would enable organizations such as Princeton’s Digital Witness Lab, which I cofounded and lead, to conduct data-driven investigations by collaborating closely with vulnerable communities, instead of relying on tech companies for access. This framework would allow researchers and others to conduct this work in a way that is safe, precise, and, most importantly, prioritizes the consent of the people being harmed.

[daisystuff]

Top 10 ways to earn money using AI tools:

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Click here for some AI Tools

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5. Online advertising: AI tools such as Google AdWords and Facebook Ads can be used to optimize online advertising campaigns and increase ROI.

Internet advertising: To improve online advertising campaigns and boost ROI, employ AI technologies like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. These programes can evaluate data to find the most effective keywords, target market, and ad placements. AI systems may also test various ad variants and automatically change bids to enhance performance. Businesses may boost their online presence, draw in more customers, and do so while spending less money by adopting AI solutions for online advertising.

Click here for some AI Tools

6. Fraud detection: AI tools can be used to detect and prevent fraud in financial transactions and e-commerce platforms.

Fraud detection: AI systems can be used to spot and stop fraud in online and financial transactions. With the help of these technologies, data may be analysed to spot suspect patterns, transactions, and behaviours and flag them for more examination. AI tools can also draw lessons from past events to increase their accuracy and stop fraud in the future. Businesses may safeguard themselves, their clients, and their reputations by adopting AI systems for fraud detection.

7. Business intelligence: AI tools can be used to analyse large amounts of data and provide insights into business performance, helping to identify areas for improvement and growth.

Business intelligence: AI systems can be used to analyse vast volumes of data and offer insights into organisational performance, assisting in the identification of opportunities for development and growth. These technologies can examine client behaviour, market trends, and sales data to offer recommendations and insights that can be put into practice. AI systems may also automate data collection and analysis, saving firms time and resources. Businesses can use AI tools for business intelligence to make better decisions and increase their bottom line.

8. Health care: AI tools can be used to improve patient outcomes by analysing medical data and providing personalized treatment recommendations.

Healthcare: By evaluating medical data and offering individualised treatment recommendations, AI techniques can be utilised to enhance patient outcomes. These systems may examine medical files, genetic information, and even data from wearable devices to spot potential health hazards and offer individualised treatment options. AI tools can also help doctors diagnose and treat patients more accurately and with fewer mistakes. Patients can receive better care while paying less money and operating more effectively by adopting AI tools in the medical field.

Click here for some AI Tools

9. Education: AI tools can be used to provide personalized learning experiences for students, improving engagement and retention.

Education: By offering students individualised learning experiences, AI systems can increase student engagement and retention. With the use of these technologies, educators can identify learning gaps and offer tailored solutions. Additionally, AI systems can give pupils individualised feedback and encouragement, boosting their motivation and self-esteem. Students can benefit from a more efficient and tailored learning experience with the use of AI tools in education, which will improve their academic results.

10. Gaming: AI tools can be used to create more realistic and engaging gaming experiences, improving user satisfaction and increasing revenue.

Gaming: Artificial intelligence (AI) tools can be utilised to develop more realistic and compelling gaming experiences, boosting user pleasure and income. With the help of these tools, game experiences may be tailored and difficulty settings can be changed to reflect player competence. Moreover, AI techniques can make gaming landscapes and people more lifelike, enhancing immersion and engagement. Game makers can produce more popular and lucrative games while enhancing the user experience by integrating AI techniques in their work.

Click here for some AI Tools

[fromdevcom]

Bot attacks are serious cybersecurity threats, with artificial intelligence (AI) amplifying both their complexity and impact across industries.  According to one recent report, malicious bots constitute more than half of all internet traffic, disrupting businesses and jeopardizing digital infrastructure worldwide. As AI technology advances, so do the capabilities of malicious bot attacks, presenting novel and sophisticated challenges for companies aiming to protect their online assets. AI Expanding Capabilities Beyond Automation Traditionally, bots were powered by simplistic scripts performing repetitive tasks, often easily identifiable due to predictable behavior patterns. However, AI has transformed these bots, enabling them to mimic human actions in increasingly complex ways.  Leveraging machine learning (ML) techniques like reinforcement learning, bots can adjust behaviors based on security system responses. For example, by varying click patterns, page interaction times, and scrolling behaviors, AI-enhanced bots can now evade detection by behavior-based security systems. In e-commerce, these capabilities allow bots to imitate human purchasing workflows to secure limited-edition products before real customers, as seen with high-demand sneaker releases from brands like Nike. Similarly, in CAPTCHA evasion, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are trained on large datasets of CAPTCHA images, enabling bots to analyze visual cues and replicate human interactions. This renders traditional CAPTCHA solutions, including Google’s reCAPTCHA v3, increasingly ineffective. Key Attack Vectors and Targeted Industries AI-enhanced bot attacks are versatile, targeting various industries and exploiting diverse vulnerabilities. Some examples of their tactics follow.  Credential stuffing attacks, where bots attempt to access accounts using large volumes of stolen usernames and passwords, are among the most prevalent bot-driven cyber threats. In October 2023, personal genomics company 23andMe suffered a major breach due to credential stuffing.  Attackers exploited compromised credentials to access user accounts that may share the same username and password combinations, exposing sensitive information, including genetic data, of approximately 6.9 million individuals. Bots circumvented typical security defenses by rotating IP addresses and using ML to predict password variations, underscoring the sophisticated nature of these threats. Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are also prime targets for bot attacks, particularly through their application programming interfaces (APIs). Attackers use bots to create fake accounts and generate content that appears authentic, exploiting APIs to bypass moderation and distribute harmful content at scale. By mimicking human behaviors such as posting and interacting, these bots evade content moderation filters, posing a significant risk for platforms attempting to preserve the authenticity and safety of online communities. Bots also play a critical role in ad fraud by mimicking human clicks on ads, deceiving advertisers, and inflating costs while yielding little to no real engagement. Additionally, in e-commerce, automated bots exploit limited stock availability by rapidly purchasing high-demand items such as electronics and concert tickets, resulting in a negative user experience for genuine customers. In 2023 alone, fraud cost advertisers $81 billion dollars, with AI-powered bots significantly contributing to these losses. AI-Driven Bot Attack Strategies AI-powered bots employ a range of sophisticated tactics to bypass traditional defenses. Adversarial ML involves bots making subtle changes to evade detection by security systems. For instance, bots might vary their click timings, introduce slight pauses, or use randomized behaviors to avoid identification by ML models designed to flag suspicious activity. Adversarial ML techniques are a growing concern, as even minor alterations can degrade the accuracy of AI-based defenses.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has identified AI model poisoning as a critical vector for bot-based attacks. In these scenarios, attackers introduce malicious data into training datasets, effectively poisoning the model’s learning process. By corrupting training data, bots can degrade the accuracy of AI systems, causing them to misclassify threats or even allow unauthorized actions. Many bots now use image recognition algorithms to analyze CAPTCHA challenges and identify patterns in human responses. By doing so, bots are able to solve CAPTCHA puzzles that were previously believed to be bot-proof, further demonstrating how AI empowers these attacks. CAPTCHA circumvention is especially problematic for industries that rely heavily on online interactions, as it erodes a critical line of defense against brute-force threats. Defense Strategies Given the surge in AI-powered bot sophistication, organizations must adopt robust defenses to counter these threats effectively. Here are some defensive strategies that have proven effective in mitigating bot attacks. Advanced bot mitigation solutions for API security and DDoS protection increasingly use ML to analyze real-time behavior, identify anomalies, and flag activity indicative of bot presence. By tracking patterns and understanding deviations from normal user behavior, these tools can recognize even the most human-like bots. For instance, some systems analyze typing speed and mouse movement fluidity—factors that are difficult for bots to replicate accurately. The Zero Trust model is particularly effective against bot attacks, as it requires continuous authentication and restricts access based on strict identity verification protocols. When integrated into a web application firewall (WAF) or a cloud-based content delivery network (CDN), this architecture helps prevent credential stuffing and API abuse by limiting access points within the network. Implementing Zero Trust policies reduces the likelihood of unauthorized access and limits the lateral movement of bots across the infrastructure. Threat intelligence sharing through networks like the Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA), enables companies to collaborate on identifying and neutralizing bot threats. Real-time intelligence sharing between organizations can significantly enhance detection by pooling resources to track bot behavior trends, IP addresses, and attack vectors. In one notable case, CTA members collaborated to disrupt a botnet targeting financial institutions by sharing critical data on bot patterns. Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) solutions, which adjust security protocols based on the risk level of each access attempt, are also effective against unauthorized bot access. Unlike traditional two-factor authentication, adaptive MFA takes into account user location, device type, and behavior, thus adding another layer of defense for high-risk accounts or transactions. Routine vulnerability assessments and regular security audits and vulnerability assessments are essential for identifying weak points that bots might exploit. By scanning for outdated software, weak APIs, and exploitable configurations, organizations can preemptively address vulnerabilities that might otherwise invite bot activity. Conclusion AI-driven bot attacks have redefined the landscape of cybersecurity, elevating the need for advanced, AI-powered defenses. From credential stuffing in consumer services to social media API abuse and ad fraud in e-commerce, these sophisticated bots now have the tools to evade traditional detection systems with ease. Techniques like adversarial machine learning, model poisoning, and CAPTCHA circumvention reveal the depth of innovation among attackers. To keep pace with these evolving threats, organizations must prioritize AI-enhanced security solutions, adopt Zero Trust policies, and engage in proactive cyber hygiene. As AI technology continues to evolve,

businesses that stay informed and adopt comprehensive defense measures will be best positioned to protect their assets and maintain trust in the face of increasingly advanced bot attacks.

[referralprogram1254586]

The Ultimate Guide to the Best PPC Affiliate Platforms

Affiliate marketing has revolutionized the way businesses and marketers collaborate, and one area where this is especially evident is in PPC affiliate Platform . PPC (Pay-Per-Click) affiliate platforms bridge the gap between advertisers and affiliates, offering lucrative opportunities to earn commissions while driving high-quality traffic.

This guide will explore the best PPC affiliate platforms available today, their benefits, and how you can maximize your earnings through them.

What is a PPC Affiliate Platform?

A PPC affiliate platform is an advertising network that connects advertisers with affiliates who promote their products or services. Affiliates earn commissions for each click, lead, or sale they generate. These platforms leverage PPC strategies, which involve paying affiliates for driving traffic rather than just sales, making them a highly effective model for both advertisers and affiliates.

Benefits of Using PPC Affiliate Platforms

Immediate Traffic

PPC campaigns provide quick results by driving traffic to websites or landing pages almost instantly.

Flexible Commission Models

Many PPC platforms allow you to earn through cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-action (CPA), or cost-per-impression (CPI) models.

Global Reach

You can target audiences worldwide, making it easier to tap into various markets.

Transparency and Tracking

Advanced tracking tools help affiliates monitor their campaigns, optimize their strategies, and maximize ROI.

Top PPC Affiliate Platforms for 2024-25

Here’s a list of the most reliable and rewarding PPC affiliate platforms to help you succeed in online affiliate marketing:

7Search PPC

7Search PPC is a standout platform for affiliates and advertisers alike, offering high-paying opportunities in various niches. It caters to industries like e-commerce, technology, and travel.

Key Features

Competitive CPC rates.

User-friendly dashboard.

Comprehensive reporting tools.

Excellent support for affiliates.

Become An Affiliate 

Google AdSense

Google AdSense is one of the most popular platforms for PPC affiliate marketing. It enables website owners to display targeted ads and earn money for every click.

Why Choose Google AdSense?

Massive advertiser network.

Highly targeted ads.

Reliable payouts.

Media.net

Powered by Yahoo and Bing, Media.net is a contextual advertising platform that works well for PPC affiliate marketers focusing on specific niches.

Highlights

High-quality ad placements.

Responsive ad units for mobile and desktop.

Access to premium advertisers.

ClickDealer

ClickDealer is a global affiliate network that specializes in PPC, CPA, and CPI campaigns. It offers opportunities across multiple verticals.

Top Features

Global traffic reach.

Exclusive offers in trending niches.

Advanced performance tracking.

PropellerAds

PropellerAds is a versatile advertising network that provides various ad formats, including push notifications, pop-ups, and native ads.

Benefits

Simple setup process.

Multiple payment options.

High-performance targeting.

Adsterra

Adsterra is an excellent choice for affiliates looking to monetize their traffic through innovative ad formats. It supports PPC campaigns across a range of industries.

Key Features

Flexible payment models.

Anti-fraud protection.

Real-time statistics.

Outbrain

Outbrain focuses on native advertising, allowing affiliates to drive quality traffic through PPC campaigns. It works well for content-based marketing.

Advantages

High user engagement.

Premium publisher partnerships.

Easy-to-use dashboard.

Revcontent

Revcontent is a leading native advertising platform known for its high-quality traffic and top-tier publishers. It's an excellent choice for affiliates focusing on PPC campaigns.

Why Revcontent?

Advanced targeting options.

Access to premium traffic sources.

High earnings potential.

Taboola

Taboola is another popular native advertising platform that allows affiliates to run PPC campaigns. It’s particularly effective for content marketers.

Features

Seamless integration with websites.

AI-powered recommendations.

Robust analytics.

HilltopAds

HilltopAds is a growing PPC affiliate platform offering high CPM and CPC rates, making it ideal for affiliates seeking substantial earnings.

Standout Features

Wide range of ad formats.

Low payment thresholds.

24/7 customer support.

How to Succeed with PPC Affiliate Marketing

Choose the Right Platform

Select a platform that aligns with your niche and audience. For example, if your focus is on native ads, platforms like Taboola or Outbrain are excellent choices.

Optimize Your Campaigns

Use A/B testing to refine your ad creatives, landing pages, and targeting strategies for better performance.

Monitor Your Metrics

Keep track of key performance indicators (KPIs) such as click-through rates (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), and conversion rates to gauge the success of your campaigns.

Leverage High-Converting Niches

Focus on niches with high demand, such as technology, health, and finance, to attract quality traffic and maximize commissions.

Key Features to Look for in PPC Affiliate Platforms

Advanced Tracking Tools

Ensure the platform offers detailed analytics and real-time tracking for better campaign optimization.

Payment Flexibility

Choose platforms that provide multiple payment options and have low minimum payout thresholds.

Support and Resources

A good platform offers comprehensive support, including tutorials, account managers, and a responsive customer service team.

Fraud Protection

Look for platforms with robust anti-fraud measures to ensure your earnings are legitimate.

Conclusion

The world of PPC affiliate marketing is filled with opportunities for those willing to learn and optimize their strategies. By partnering with the best PPC affiliate platforms like 7Search PPC, Google AdSense, or Media.net, you can maximize your earnings while driving quality traffic for advertisers.

Take the first step today by exploring these platforms and building a strategy tailored to your goals. With the right approach, affiliate marketing can become a sustainable and profitable venture!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is a PPC affiliate platform?

Ans: A PPC affiliate platform connects advertisers with affiliates, paying them for driving traffic through pay-per-click campaigns.

How do PPC affiliate platforms work?

Ans: Affiliates promote ads provided by the platform. When users click on these ads, affiliates earn a commission based on the platform’s CPC or CPA model.

Which PPC affiliate platform is best for beginners?

Ans: Platforms like Google AdSense and 7Search PPC are beginner-friendly due to their simplicity and reliable support.

Can I join multiple PPC affiliate platforms?

Ans: Yes, joining multiple platforms allows you to diversify your income streams and target different niches.

How much can I earn through PPC affiliate marketing?

Ans: Earnings depend on factors like traffic quality, niche, and platform payout rates. Successful affiliates can earn anywhere from $500 to $10,000 monthly.

[mfilterit]

Ad Fraud Prevention | Website Fraud Detection | Click Fraud Detection Software

Valid8's Web Fraud is a cutting-edge SaaS solution designed to safeguard your digital advertising campaigns and websites from the detrimental effects of invalid traffic and fake clicks. With its real-time protection powered by advanced AI and machine learning technology, Valid8 automatically blocks invalid traffic on platforms like Google Ads and Meta Ads, ensuring that your ad budget is utilized effectively. Its sophisticated algorithms not only eliminate bot traffic but also defend against competitor tactics that might drain your budget or undermine your market position. The platform offers granular control over your campaigns through customizable protection settings and provides actionable insights via a user-friendly dashboard. This allows you to monitor ad performance, refine your targeting and bidding strategies, and optimize your ad creatives for better results. With Valid8, you gain comprehensive protection, verification, and optimization capabilities to enhance the effectiveness of your digital advertising investments.

To know more visit Valid8 | Ad Traffic Validation.

[elfwreck]

An empire is an arrangement among nations, backed and usually imposed by military force, that extracts wealth from a periphery of subject nations and concentrates it in the imperial core. Put more simply, an empire is a wealth pump, a device to enrich one nation at the expense of others. The mechanism of the pump varies from empire to empire and from age to age; the straightforward exaction of tribute that did the job for ancient Egypt, and had another vogue in the time of imperial Spain, has been replaced in most of the more recent empires by somewhat less blatant though equally effective systems of unbalanced exchange. While the mechanism varies, though, the underlying principle does not. None of this would have raised any eyebrows at all in a discussion of the mechanics of empire, in America or elsewhere, during the late nineteenth century. Such discussions took place, in the mass media of the time as well as in the corridors of power, and it was widely understood that the point to having an empire was precisely that it made your nation rich.

Within empires are fractal variants of the same structure: extract money from the poor to enhance the resources of the wealthy.

You cannot dismantle the structure by withholding wealth at the lower level. You have to change the structure itself. You have to change the way resources move within a region, within a nation, within the empire.

That means legislation with force behind it.

(Right now, we have anti-monopolistic legislation... but it's not being enforced. We have anti-fraud laws that aren't being enforced, hence the false ads on mobile games. We have anti-harassment laws that aren't being enforced, hence the need for spam filters in email )

45% of global email traffic is unwanted, often illegal communications that eat bandwidth and require special software to keep from being overwhelmed by it.

For one person, that's no big deal. You set some filters and occasionally have to delete a nuisance from your inbox. For the IT industry... How much time is being spent managing spam instead of developing useful software? How much slower is your internet because almost half of its processing power is dealing with digital garbage?

How many competitors to Google might we have, if startup internet services didn't need to spend substantial time & effort developing anti-spam tools?

The problem is not "The fishing industry is corrupt and wasteful." The problem is, "Empire-based economics are designed to extract wealth from the poor and give it to the rich, and anything that happens along the way - including environmental decimation - is considered an ancillary cost that's only addressed after it interferes with the wealth pump."

The fixes for this start with legislation to prevent the wealth pump from working. This is HARD to get established, because the people who make legislation are beneficiaries of that wealth pump.

But it can happen, because sometimes it clicks in their heads that they can have comfortably wealthy lives without the poor being miserable, and without trying to make the planet unlivable for humans. The goal should not be "nobody is wealthy" nor even "nobody is obscenely stinking rich" but "nobody feasts while others starve." And you can get at least some legislators to support that goal.

(The next part of the fix is "change the culture so that the economic theories value something other than human labor" and that's more complicated.)

As much as I want to support ethical farming practices I will be buying the cheapest bag of frozen chicken thighs as much as the next frugal/poor person which is why animal welfare needs to be legislated, not left up to the invisible hand of the free market or some bullshit. Invisible hand of the free market finds itself around a lot of throats.

[namantogwe]

The Future of Digital Marketing Agencies: What’s Next?

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, staying ahead of the curve is crucial for businesses and agencies alike. Digital marketing agencies, in particular, are at the forefront of innovation, leveraging cutting-edge technologies and strategies to deliver results. As businesses increasingly rely on these agencies for growth, understanding the future of digital marketing agency is essential.

In this blog, we’ll explore the key trends, technologies, and shifts shaping the future of digital marketing agencies, and how these changes can benefit businesses seeking to thrive in a competitive marketplace.

The Evolving Role of Digital Marketing Agencies

Digital marketing agencies have traditionally been known for offering services like search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media management, and content creation. However, the role of these agencies is expanding. In the future, they will not only manage campaigns but also act as strategic partners, helping businesses navigate complex digital ecosystems.

Key Shifts in Agency Roles:

Data-Driven Decision Making:Agencies will increasingly use advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to craft campaigns tailored to audience behavior and preferences.

Omnichannel Expertise:Agencies must become proficient in managing a seamless experience across platforms, from social media to email and even emerging channels like virtual reality (VR).

Consultative Approach:Beyond execution, agencies will serve as consultants, guiding businesses on digital transformation strategies.

Trends Shaping the Future of Digital Marketing Agencies

As technology and consumer expectations evolve, several trends are set to redefine how digital marketing agencies operate.

1. AI-Powered Marketing

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing digital marketing. From chatbots to predictive analytics, AI empowers agencies to create highly personalized and efficient campaigns. For example, AI can analyze customer data to predict purchasing behavior, allowing agencies to deliver targeted ads at the right time.

How Agencies Will Use AI:

Enhanced customer segmentation for tailored messaging.

Automated content creation and scheduling.

AI-driven chatbots for 24/7 customer engagement.

2. Voice Search Optimization

With the rise of smart speakers like Amazon Alexa and Google Home, voice search is becoming a significant part of the digital experience. Digital marketing agencies must adapt strategies to ensure clients rank for voice search queries.

Future Tactics:

Focus on conversational keywords.

Create FAQ-style content optimized for natural language.

Ensure local SEO is voice-search-friendly.

3. Sustainability and Ethical Marketing

Consumers are increasingly drawn to brands that prioritize sustainability and ethical practices. Agencies will need to align marketing strategies with these values, highlighting a brand’s social and environmental impact.

Strategies Agencies Will Adopt:

Promote eco-friendly initiatives in campaigns.

Ensure transparency in advertising practices.

Partner with brands aligned with sustainable values.

Emerging Technologies for Digital Marketing Agencies

Technological advancements will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of digital marketing agencies. Here are some innovations poised to make a significant impact:

1. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)

AR and VR technologies are transforming customer experiences. Digital marketing agencies are already experimenting with immersive campaigns, and their use will only grow in the future.

Examples:

Virtual try-ons for e-commerce brands.

Interactive VR experiences for product launches.

AR-powered advertisements on social media platforms.

2. Blockchain Technology

While primarily associated with cryptocurrencies, blockchain has applications in digital marketing, such as ensuring transparency in ad placements and combating ad fraud.

Benefits for Agencies:

Improved ad tracking and verification.

Enhanced trust through transparent data practices.

Opportunities to integrate blockchain-based loyalty programs.

3. Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising uses AI to automate ad buying, ensuring that the right ads reach the right audience at the right time. As this technology advances, digital marketing agencies will leverage it to increase efficiency and ROI.

Preparing for the Future: Skills Agencies Must Develop

To remain competitive, digital marketing agencies must invest in upskilling their teams. The future demands a blend of creativity, technical expertise, and strategic thinking.

Essential Skills for the Future:

AI and Machine Learning Proficiency:Understanding AI tools and algorithms will be crucial for campaign optimization.

Data Analysis and Interpretation:Agencies must analyze vast amounts of data to uncover actionable insights.

Creativity in Emerging Formats:The ability to design engaging content for AR, VR, and other immersive platforms will be a game-changer.

Ethical Marketing Practices:Agencies need to be well-versed in ethical advertising and data usage.

How Businesses Can Benefit from Future-Ready Digital Marketing Agencies

Businesses partnering with forward-thinking digital marketing agencies will enjoy a competitive edge. By leveraging innovative technologies and trends, these agencies can help brands:

Enhance customer experiences through personalization.

Stay relevant in an increasingly digital world.

Drive higher engagement and conversions through cutting-edge campaigns.

Choosing the right digital marketing agency will be critical. Businesses should look for agencies that demonstrate adaptability, a commitment to staying ahead of trends, and a track record of innovation.

Final Thoughts: Staying Ahead in a Competitive Landscape

The future of digital marketing agencies is bright, filled with opportunities to innovate and redefine how businesses connect with their audiences. From AI and AR to ethical marketing and voice search optimization, the possibilities are endless.

For businesses, partnering with a digital marketing agency that embraces these advancements is key to achieving sustained growth. As agencies evolve to become strategic partners, they will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping the success of businesses in the digital age.

If you’re looking to future-proof your marketing efforts, it’s time to collaborate with a forward-thinking digital marketing agency. Together, you can navigate the complexities of tomorrow’s digital landscape and achieve unparalleled success.

[km309oo]

How Lunio.ai Improved My Ad Campaigns: A Game-Changing Click Fraud Solution

I recently started using Lunio.ai to protect my advertising campaigns from click fraud, and it has been a game changer. As someone running multiple PPC and display ad campaigns, I was losing a significant portion of my ad budget to fraudulent clicks. Lunio’s real-time detection system quickly identified and blocked suspicious activities, significantly reducing wasted spend.

One of the features I appreciate most is its detailed reporting—the insights provided help me understand traffic quality and adjust my targeting accordingly. Additionally, the easy integration with major ad platforms like Google Ads made setup a breeze. Lunio also adapts well across different ad networks, which is a big plus since I run campaigns across multiple channels.

Overall, Lunio.ai is a robust solution for anyone dealing with click fraud. It has improved my ROI and given me better control over ad spend. Highly recommended for businesses of any size looking to safeguard their digital marketing efforts!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google makes millions on paid abortion disinformation

Google’s search quality has been in steady decline for years, and Google assures us that they’re working on it, though the most visible effort is replacing links to webpages with lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a confident habitual liar chatbot:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

The internet is increasingly full of garbage, much of it written by other confident habitual liar chatbots, which are now extruding plausible sentences at enormous scale. Future confident habitual liar chatbots will be trained on the output of these confident liar chatbots, producing Jathan Sadowski’s “Habsburg AI”:

https://twitter.com/jathansadowski/status/1625245803211272194

But the declining quality of Google Search isn’t merely a function of chatbot overload. For many years, Google’s local business listings have been terrible. Anyone who’s tried to find a handyman, a locksmith, an emergency tow, or other small businessperson has discovered that Google is worse than useless for this. Try to search for that locksmith on the corner that you pass every day? You won’t find them — but you will find a fake locksmith service that will dispatch an unqualified, fumble-fingered guy with a drill and a knockoff lock, who will drill out your lock, replace it with one made of bubblegum and spit, and charge you 400% the going rate (and then maybe come back to rob you):

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-locksmiths-may-be-out-to-pick-your-pocket-too.html

Google is clearly losing the fraud/spam wars, which is pretty awful, given that they have spent billions to put every other search engine out of business. They spend $45b every year to secure exclusivity deals that prevent people from discovering or using rivals — that’s like buying a whole Twitter every year, just so they don’t have to compete:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-a-google-antitrust-case-could/

But there’s an even worse form of fraudulent listing on Google, one they could do something about, but choose not to: ad-fraud. For all the money and energy thrown into “dark SEO” to trick Google into putting your shitty, scammy website at the top of the listings, there’s a much simpler method. All you need to do is pay Google — buy an ad, and your obviously fraudulent site will be right there, at the top of the search results.

There are so many top searches that go to fraud or malware sites. Tech support is a favorite. It’s not uncommon to search for tech support for Google products and be served a fake tech-support website where a scammer will try to trick you into installing a remote-access trojan and then steal everything you have, and/or take blackmail photos of you with your webcam:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-search-ads-infiltrated-again-by-tech-support-scams/

This is true even when Google has a trivial means of reliably detecting fraud. Take the restaurant monster-in-the-middle scam: a scammer clones the menu of a restaurant, marking up their prices by 15%, and then buys the top ad slot for searches for that restaurant. Search for the restaurant, click the top link, and land on a lookalike site. The scammer collects your order, bills your card, then places the same order, in your name, with the restaurant.

The thing is, Google runs these ads even for restaurants that are verified merchants — Google mails the restaurant a postcard with a unique number on it, and the restaurant owner keys that number in to verify that they are who they say they are. It would not be hard for Google to check whether an ad for a business matches one of its verified merchants, and, if so, whether the email address is a different one from the verified one on file. If so, Google could just email the verified address with a “Please confirm that you’re trying to buy an ad for a website other than the one we have on file” message:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Google doesn’t do this. Instead, they accept — and make a fortune from — paid disinformation, across every category.

But not all categories of paid disinformation are equally bad: it’s one thing to pay a 15% surcharge on a takeout meal, but there’s a whole universe of paid medical disinformation that Google knows about and has an official policy of tolerating.

This paid medical disinformation comes from “crisis pregnancy centers”: these are fake abortion clinics that raise huge sums from religious fanatics to buy ads that show up for people seeking information about procuring an abortion. If they are duped by one of these ads, they are directed to a Big Con-style storefront staffed by people who pretend that they perform abortions, but who bombard their marks with falsehoods about health complications.

These con artists try to trick their marks into consenting to sexual assault — a transvaginal ultrasound. This is a prelude to another fraud, in which the “sporadic electrical impulses” generated by an early fetal structure is a “heartbeat” (early fetuses do not have hearts, so they cannot produce heartbeats):

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/heartbeat-bills-called-fetal-heartbeat-six-weeks-pregnancy-rcna24435

If the victim still insists on getting an abortion, the fraudsters will use deceptive tactics to draw out the process until they run out the clock for a legal abortion, procuring a forced birth through deceit.

It is hard to imagine a less ethical course of conduct. Google’s policy of accepting “crisis pregnancy center” ads is the moral equivalent of taking money from fake oncologists who counsel people with cancer to forego chemotherapy in favor of juice-cleanses.

There is no ambiguity here: the purpose of a “crisis prengancy center” is to deceive people seeking abortions into thinking they are dealing with an abortion clinic, and then further deceive them into foregoing the abortion, by means of lies, sexually invasive and unnecessary medical procedures, and delaying tactics.

Now, a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate finds that Google made $10m last year on ads from “crisis pregnancy centers”:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-made-millions-from-ads-for-fake-abortion-clinics/

Many of these “crisis pregnancy centers” are also registered 501(c)3 charities, which makes them eligible for Google’s ad grants, which provide free ads to nonprofits. Marketers who cater to “crisis pregnancy center” advertise that they can help their clients qualify for these grants. In 2019, Google was caught giving tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of free ads to “crisis pregnancy centers”:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/12/google-advertising-abortion-obria

The keywords that “crisis pregnancy centers” bid up include “Planned Parenthood” — meaning that if actual Planned Parenthood clinics want to appear at the top of the search for “planned parenthood,” they have to outbid the fraudsters seeking to deceive Planned Parenthood patients.

Google has an official policy of requiring customers that pay for ads matching abortion-related search terms to label their ads to state whether or not they provide abortions, but the report documents failures to enforce this policy. The labels themselves are confusing: for example, abortion travel funds have to be labeled as “not providing abortions.”

Google isn’t afraid to ban whole categories of advertising: for example, Google has banned Plan C, a nonprofit that provides information about medication abortions. The company erroneously classes Plan C as an “unauthorized pharmacy.” But Google continues to offer paid disinformation on behalf of forced birth groups that claim there is such a thing as “abortion reversal” (there isn’t — but the “abortion reversal” drug cocktail is potentially lethal).

This is inexcusable, but it’s not unique — and it’s not even that profitable. $10m is a drop in the bucket for a company like Google. When you’re lighting $45b/year on fire just to prevent competition, $10m is chump change. A better way to understand Google’s relationship to paid disinformation can be found by studying Facebook’s own paid disinformation problem.

Facebook has a well-documented problem with paid political disinformation — unambiguous, illegal materials, like paid notices advising people to remember to vote on November 6th (when election day falls on November 5th). The company eventually promised to put political ads in a repository where they could be inspected by all parties to track its progress in blocking paid disinformation.

Facebook did a terrible job at this, with huge slices of its political ads never landing in its transparency portal. We know this because independent researchers at NYU’s engineering school built an independent, crowdsourced tracker called Ad Observer, which scraped all the ads volunteers saw and uploaded them to a portal called Ad Observatory.

Facebook viciously attacked the NYU project, falsely smearing it as a privacy risk (the plugin was open source and was independently audited by Mozilla researchers, who confirmed that it didn’t collect any personal information). When that didn’t work, they sent a stream of legal threats, claiming that NYU was trafficking in a “circumvention device” as defined by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a felony carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine — for a first offense.

Eventually, NYU folded the project. Facebook, meanwhile, has fired or reassigned most of the staff who work on political ad transparency:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

What are we to make of this? Facebook claims that it doesn’t need or want political ad revenue, which are a drop in the bucket and cause all kinds of headaches. That’s likely true — but Facebook’s aversion to blocking political ads doesn’t extend to spending a lot of money to keep paid political disinfo off the platform.

The company could turn up the sensitivity on its blocking algorithm, which would generate more false positives, in which nonpolitical ads are misidentified and have to be reviewed by humans. This is expensive, and it’s an expense Facebook can avoid if it can suppress information about its failures to block paid political disinformation. It’s cheaper to silence critics than it is to address their criticism.

I don’t think Google gives a shit about the $10m it gets from predatory fake abortion clinics. But I think the company believes that the PR trouble it would get into for blocking them — and the expense it would incur in trying to catch and block fake abortion clinic ads — are real liabilities. In other words, it’s not about the $10m it would lose by blocking the ads — Google wants to avoid the political heat it would take from forced birth fanatics and cost of the human reviewers who would have to double-check rejected ads.

In other words, Google doesn’t abet fraudulent abortion clinics because they share the depraved sadism of the people who run these clinics. Rather, Google teams up with these sadists out of cowardice and greed.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/15/paid-medical-disinformation/#crisis-pregnancy-centers

[Image ID: A ruined streetscene. Atop a pile of rubble sits a dilapidated shack. In front of the shack is a letterboard with the word ABORTIONS set off-center and crooked. In the foreground is a carny barker at a podium, gesturing at the sign and the shack. The barker's head and face have been replaced with the Google logo. Within the barker's podium is a heap of US$100 bills.]

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en