When I wanted to play some music from YouTube for work, I was prepared for some commercials between songs. That’s the way it is, and if you don’t pay for a premium membership, you have to put up with trailers for everything. I’m not against ads, I understand their point, but basically I’m not interested. But one of them caught my attention, so much so that eventually this article was created.
Among Mike Oldfield’s ambient compositions, such a dramatic musical backdrop suddenly appeared that I had to check to see if another playlist was running. On the screen was this:
Photo: Prinscreen from Youtube, Pan Sova
The smiling director of ČEZ, a wind power plant and, with an investment of CZK 6,000, a monthly income of CZK 65,000. In addition, right next to it, an advertising banner promising a great future with the help of a government project. The fact that it is a fraud has already been written about a thousand times. There is no company like CEZ-Group, and CEZ with this “investment project” has nothing in common. If you send money to these cyber crooks, you won’t see them again, but you may also end up with a whitewashed account or the police as White horse.
I encountered a video of this type of fraud for the first time, but banners pop up at me with iron regularity not only on YouTube, but also on social networks. I report them robotically. On YouTube it is possible after expanding the icon of three dots. There you will also see who is the advertiser. In the case of fraudulent ads, they are advertisers from, for example, Kazakhstan, as in the image below. CEZ will probably have nothing to do with it.
Foto: Print screen z YouTube, Pan Sova
But reporting pofid ads doesn’t help. Their contractors change, countries and names change, and the operators of advertising systems on social networks apparently do not respond to user comments anyway. Well, at least I never got any response.
But why can the advertisement, which is an obvious fraud, which is also written about everywhere, still be displayed so much? Isn’t there some mechanism that could identify the ads? Obviously yes, which proves it this article on Novinky, which states: “We have strict principles that must be followed by advertisements on our platforms,” said a spokeswoman for the Czech and Slovak branches of the largest search engine and at the same time the operator of the advertising system. According to her, they fulfill these principles both with the help of robots and with human control.
We live in an age where artificial intelligence (AI) is developing at such a pace that it could almost certainly detect fraudulent ads based on clear attributes and then pass them on to a human for assessment. Why can’t the operator of the largest Internet search engine and the company behind the most visited social networks handle something like this?
For me, as a user, such overlooking only leads to me not visiting the given services at all or as little as possible.
People fall for scammers despite being warned every day
That no one can come across such an ad anymore? I also think the same, after all, similar frauds are written about almost every day in the media. But people who allow themselves to be manipulated by fraudsters into a merry-go-round of promises with the prospect of huge profits are still among us. Manipulators can use sophisticated social engineering to completely confuse less resistant individuals who succumb to them. The last example says it all – a young woman came across a photo of a well-known Czech politician who promised her wealth. She lost 116 thousand. Maybe she just saw this scam ad:
Photo: Printscreen from Instagram. Source: Mr. Owl
But cybercriminals do not stop at these frauds, which are obvious to many. They try new and new tricks, get better at social engineering, are brash and dangerous. Be careful and don’t give them a dime.
2024-02-25 17:25:36
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