Lacking a technical fix, isn't this fundamentally a KYC problem? There's an arms race of fraud against banks and financial companies, but it seems like they're managing okay.
By the way, this is already done since Google does check advertiser accounts against various sanctions and watchlists as part of dosing business in every country they operate in.
The point is that it’s not a resource or scale issue (as you keep arguing), but a profit and incentives issue as I said before.
Requiring bank-scale KYC on top of that to also work with the advertisers would cut the 4 million advertisers Google currently serves down to a tiny fraction of that (if for no other reason than they don't have infrastructure to background-vet 4 million customers; they don't currently).
Perhaps this is the right approach. It would end the days of being able to set up an advertising account in a few hours. Perhaps that's not needed anymore.
(This would, of course, mean people giving even more PII to Google. However one feels about that).
Yes that's the problem.
> "Requiring bank-scale KYC..."
Nobody said that. The KYC part is an analogy to the financial industry to use procedures to screen out bad actors. But it doesn't need the same requirements.
> " they don't have infrastructure to background-vet 4 million customers"
KYC is not difficult. Again, banks and finance companies which are far smaller than Google do this all the time, for all of their customers and anyone involved in transactions. This is 100s of millions of clients.
> "Perhaps this is the right approach."
This approach is far more nuanced than the binary outcome you're interpreting. There are ad and account approvals already. There are different scales requiring different support and sales already. Having more intensive checks as the spending scales is a very simple and effective strategy that can be applied today.
The company doesn't care about the number of customers, it cares about the revenue against potential risk (just like every other every business), and currently the risk is acceptable for these ads and advertisers to continue.
That ability was never needed and was never a good idea.