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Comment by marbu | Hacker News Reader

I reported about 5 such ads just this moth, all clear financial scams impersonating well known people and companies in Czech republic (where I live), only to be told that youtube checked my claim and that the add in question doesn't break any youtube policy.

Obviously nothing is forcing Google to deal with this in any way. But I wonder how could that work out for Google in the long run.

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The more legitimate reasons for adblockers (such as "I don't want to risk falling for scams."), the worse their anti-adblocker efforts look.

The same thing happened to me. Ads from Kazakhstan impersonating a Czech state-owned energy company etc. And almost every day there is an article in the news about how older people have been caught and lost their savings.

In my case, it was either from Kazakhstan or the US.

So Google is then knowingly participating in financial scams? Looks like grounds for a lawsuit.

Google is not alone in promoting such scams and being complicit of crime. The law doesn't apply to big companies though, so they can keep doing so and profiting off it.

DMCA takedowns are proof that law applies to big companies too. Unfortunately, they only respond to lawsuits it seems.

Victims of these scams should sue Google, Meta and any other big company knowingly participating in these kind of scams.

> Obviously nothing is forcing Google to deal with this in any way

Really? I mean, they're getting paid by a scammer who uses provably fake and deceptive content to prey on its victims; they have been alerted to the situation, they claim they reviewed it, and that they think it's fine. What could go wrong?

Yeah. This is why I doubt it's a good strategy for Google in the long term. Sooner or later, someone will be finally pissed off enough to go after this practice (either a government or another big US company).

That said, there seems to be no legal way for a big Czech company to go neither against Google or the scammers, otherwise this would have been already resolved. CEZ (one of the companies being impersonated by the scammers here) made a press release about this almost 2 years ago (references are in Czech):

https://www.cez.cz/cs/pro-media/tiskove-zpravy/klamave-rekla... https://www.cez.cz/cs/podvodna-reklama

Thanks. I still don't understand how is it possible that suing youtube doesn't work after having reported the ads and having been told that they're fine. You basically have a written statement from the company that incriminates them.

Seems like the only policy is that it makes money. If it does then everything's ok.

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