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How do they get away with it?

How do big tech companies get away with being accomplices to frauds that cost consumers billions of dollars a year?

Seriously -- I am utterly gobsmacked at how blatantly companies like Meta and YouTube take money from scammers to pitch their fraudulent wares on those platforms yet take zero responsibility for the outcomes.

I could understand them claiming innocence if, when advised of such scams, they immediately pulled the offending ads -- but they don't. Ads are allowed to run for weeks or even months while the platforms concerned "look into them" and all the while, innocent consumers are ripped off and swindled.

Why is big-tech being given a free-pass on their complicity with these frauds?

Even when the media reports the facts, regulators seem to turn a blind eye.

Isn't it time that consumer watchdogs got off their fat bums and did something?

Why do we even have such authorities if they're simply prepared to sit back and watch giant corporations rake in the billions of dollars these scams net them in the form of ad revenues?

What hold do the likes of Google and Meta have over governments and their watchdog agencies that nobody seems to give a shite?

I'm not really a Facebook user (write-only) but I am a heavy user of YouTube and the scale of scam-ads on that platform right now, in the lead-up to Christmas, has gone far beyond a joke. So much so that I made this video on the weekend -- a video that I see YouTube has effectively shadow-banned, perhaps for obvious reasons:

A look at the comments on that video shows that people are not happy. Some in the comments have already fallen foul of such scams and others are as outraged as myself.

I love the irony of YouTube's support team over on X whose response to my complaints was to simply suggest I block ads that I consider to be scams.

WTF?

It's not *me* who is at risk from these scams, I have enough commonsense and knowledge to recognise when someone's trying to rip me off. The reason that I (and thousands of others) report these scams is to avoid seeing vulnerable people screwed.

YouTube doesn't care though -- it's all money in the bank for them.

So where's the irony?

Well YouTube says "block the ads" yet if I really block the ads by using something like PiHole or a browser plug-in, they threaten to stop me from using the platform altogether.

Will they ever be called to account over this conspiracy to defraud the public?

Of course not. Sadly, big-tech now seems to have made itself so powerful that even governments and their consumer protection agencies dare not upset them. In fact, the two seem to be working in unison these days to further grow their power.

This age-gating of access to social media (run by big-tech) is not what it seems. It too is a fraud and a scam.

Big-tech doesn't want to stop under-16s from accessing its plaforms, it wants to force everyone to submit ID so that it can connect cookies to real identities, thus making its ability to target advertising insanely accurate.

Imagine a world where an advertiser can say "I want my ad shown to these people (list of names) and Google or Facebook can deliver on that request. This is where we're headed.

I'm not happy... are you?

Carpe Diem folks!

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