I don’t get it. I’ve NEVER given them any money. AND if they do manage to get through my spam filter I go out of my way to NEVER buy that product ever again. How are they making that much money?

There are scam ads on YouTube as wel, with ai deepfakes of our country’s prime minister telling people to go to a site, which is where you get scammed. I don’t understand why nobody is held responsible for these ads and why they don’t seem to go away

I try to educate my less tech literate friends and family to use ad-blockers and never click on ads. The issue with browser based ad-blockers is that as soon as people visit a site that doesn’t work (due to the ad-blocking) or that shows them a warning about “you’re using an ad-blocker”, they want the blocker gone. That little bit of a bump in the road is too much for them. It’s one of those things where they have to do it so infrequently, that they’ll never remember how to temporarily turn it off or make bypass rules, so to them it just becomes an inconvenience to use a blocker.

And as for the ads, a surprising number of people are defensive about being told not to click them. I’ll hear things like “I get all kinds of cool stuff that way” or “I’m using virus protection so it doesn’t matter what I click” and other frustrating responses. Viruses aren’t the only concern even if your protection is 100% perfect.

About the only thing that’s been effective (at least temporarily) is when people DO get these scam ads. “Help, my computer is yelling at me that I’m breaking the law and need to call Microsoft now” pretty much tells me that this person was clicking ads on Facebook. They basically allow(ed) ads to serve up obfuscated code via Microsoft Azure (which means they have microsoft.com domains in the link that “look” safe). I’m sorry, but ads don’t need to run code, there’s no excuse for having ever allowed that kind of implementation at all. Video, images, audio, text – and even several of those are entirely optional and up for debate.