Targeted non-advertising

[Sundayjumper]

An interesting thing happened. I'm well aware of targeted advertising, I'm sure we all are, so it's no surprise really but I'd never considered there's also targeted blocking of adverts.

I've been getting a lot of "investment" adverts on Facebook. Fairly obviously dubious ones selling advice & training, filmed in a very low budget spare room*. I also started getting adverts for whiskey investments. These ones utterly scream PONZI !!! just like the shipping container scams a few years ago. An asset that you never get to see or touch in real life, that doesn't have a open market, that you have to rely entirely on the scheme itself to pay out.

I was browsing Facebook on my phone at the time. My finger hovered over the "report post" button but I thought I should do a tiny bit of due diligence first just in case some of these things are legit, so I switched to Safari and googled "whiskey ponzi". I read one article from a couple of years ago. I switched back to Facebook and.... all the whiskey ads had gone. Instantly. And I've not seen any more since.

So it would appear the advertising algorithm isn't just designed to target vulnerable people, it's also been tuned to avoid people who know it's a scam. Perfectly logical from the scammer's point of view but somehow feels even more sinister.



* if you're such an expert, I'd expect you to have spent some of your immense profits on at least hiring a nice office for the advert...

[mik]

Yeah that seems very sneaky. Clever though.