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Google Sues Dodgy Advertisers
angry tapir writes "Google is at its wit's end dealing with illegal sellers of prescription drugs that market medicines on its ad network, so it has decided to take some of these allegedly rogue advertisers to court. Rogue prescription drug sellers have increased in number and become more sophisticated in their dealings, and 'a small percentage' of them have been able to dodge Google's efforts to block them from running ads on its network, according to the company."
How do I order?
How do I order?
Talk to Dr. William E. Morrow of Layton, Utah who signed for thousands of prescriptions that two of Kyle Rootsaert's pharmacies filled. From that article:
CNN's Special Investigations Unit first examined Rootsaert and Roots Pharmacy, the company he owns in American Fork, in 2008. CNN Correspondent Drew Griffin ordered the antidepressant Prozac over the internet without a doctor's prescription, and the pills were delivered by overnight express the following day.
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and FBI are very very interested in all of this and as the article notes, Google is quick to show they're on the government's side regarding these pharmacies. Google faces very low risk (alleging breach of AdWords contracts allowing others to back out of contracts) while reducing its liability exposure by way of this lawsuit if any of the 49 "John Doe" owned sites face criminal investigation.
My work here is dung.
Yeah.. they should give back the money to the people they're suing.
Because with any other service providers, of any type, they give back money when the customer violates the terms of service. Oh wait.. they don't. They give you the boot, maybe take you to court, and keep the money.
Maybe you didn't think anything but "ZOMG GOOGLE! MUST BASH THEM!" If only we could put down the rabid trolls...
Google's ads have been pointless for a long time. I don't understand how they make as much revenue as they do with ads that no one, or at least not anyone I know clicking on them. The ads are mostly spam and scams. Their text format is bad too. I rarely click on ads but those that I do are usualy non flash banners, or I'll unknowingly read a paid for review. A few key word lines of text doesn't have the click me afpeal that oither ad options do. It is about time they cleaned up their advertisers and made them more relevent.
...Google has only one wit.
Because with any other service providers, of any type, they give back money when the customer violates the terms of service. Oh wait.. they don't. They give you the boot, maybe take you to court, and keep the money.
Actually, for any service that's terminated, typically by law you are pro-rated on your payment. For example, I pay car insurance in 6mo increments. When I decided to switch insurers, by law, my former agency was not allowed to keep 5mo of payments. Even if I did something that caused them to terminate my policy. I was pro-rated on 5 of the 6 months I paid, and received a check for that amount.
If only we could put down the rabid idiots.
From reading the article, it seems that they are suing for breach of the AdWords contract. This seems unlikely to me to shut down the illegal pharmacies, unless Google is paying investigators to actually do business with the pharmacies and track them down "in real life" --- in which case, why not just give the evidence they obtain to the applicable LEOs?
I suppose one doesn't prevent the other, but the article doesn't at all address this possibility, in fact, it spins the story like Google might be doing this for CYA in case law enforcement catches these guys all by themselves.
So they should give up the money..but not to any one in particular.
Are you retarded?
... please do some editing! There is no need to link to another website when you can go directly to the source!
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Well to be fair, if I had a costumer I would probably sue him too. Having a costumer probably explains why I am always dressed in a clown suit or the like.
We're not talking about "giving the money back", as in returning it. The OP suggested google was "giving [the money] up", as in no longer accepting it. In stopping this sort of advertiser from posting ads, Google is denying itself a source of revenue.
Stories like this always surprise me for a second because since I haven't seen hardly any ads in years I often forget they're there in the first place.
How are they really going to prevent it from happening? They can stop it after they know about it, but they couldn't prevent it without requiring human review of every single ad is created.
Spam filters are getting pretty good at identifying ads for pharmaceuticals, without human review of every single ad.
Well, what you should do is commit insurance fraud to really test that hypothesis. Then after you've been caught and convicted ask for your money back.
Whenever I turn-off my ad-blocker, I get those annoying ads with cartoony images of before-and-after fatties, it aggravates me so much that I don't feel sorry for blocking these sites' revenues... I hope they get banned next.
I've seen a ton of dodgy ads for penny stocks and the like on their service lately.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The price is 1/10th retail.
The drugs are effective and actually appear to be the real thing in real packaging.
So how can these guys sell this way at such low prices when my pills legitimately through mail order discount places run $2 to $3 each?
Have to be gross amounts of profit somewhere in the chain.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That's fine for text, but what about graphical ads?
One word (sort of...) Captcha
Name any one of those "must prevent robots and low IQ humans too" type in what you see graphic programs and someone will be able to name a counter. Image recognition AI techniques are quite a bit more capable than most would believe.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I would bet that if your car insurance was terminated because you torched your car to collect on your policy, the insurance company wouldn't have to refund you any part of your paid premiums.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Google's business model requires dodgy advertisers. Google has created and funded a whole industry of AdWords arbitrage, encouraging web spam. That's a big part of their customer base. How often do you see a Fortune 1000 company in a Google ad?
In 2004 and 2005, Google sponsored the "Web Spam Squashing Summit" In 2006, Google turned to the dark side. They started sponsoring the Search Engine Strategies conference, the web spammer's convention. That's when "Don't be Evil" ended.
We track Google ads at SiteTruth, trying to find the business behind the ad. For about 36% of Google ads (by domain, not hits) not on search pages, there's no identifiable real-world business behind the ad. We call those "bottom-feeders". The "John Does" Google is suing fall into that category. If Google kicked off all those "John Doe" advertisers, they'd lose a third of their advertiser base.
In that case any refunds would get absorbed in fines.
I get people coming to the reference desk asking for information about various treatments for ailments. Sometimes actual science-based medicine, sometimes plausible alternative medicine, and sometimes outright quackery, and sometimes all three at once.
I usually turn the monitor around so that they can see what I am doing. (Sometimes I think this may be a mistake, because they don't understand what I am doing.) If I'm doing a series of Google searches, trying to narrow things down to what we're looking for, they'll stop me and point to the ads. Usually (almost invariably) selling some transparently bogus alternative treatment. (Remember, they're coming to me asking me to help them find out what's what, not necessarily looking for someplace to buy their radiation crystal magnets.) They'll say "OH, OH, THAT'S IT!" when they see a keyword or two in the ad that relates to what they're looking for.
There are a LOT of people who receive information completely uncritically. They can't tell an ad trying to sell them something from an informational article. They can't tell the difference between an emotional appeal or an argument based essentially on sympathetic magic from actual science. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO CLICK THOSE ADS. They'll reject things if they've been inoculated against it, but only because they've been told that they should, and had that admonition connected to some deeply held belief. They won't do so because they have legitimately considered whether it could be true or false.
That is why advertisers, particularly on Google with its text ads, have the potential to do a lot of harm.
How are they really going to prevent it from happening? They can stop it after they know about it, but they couldn't prevent it without requiring human review of every single ad is created.
Protip: Every single fucking ad they push through their network SHOULD BE HUMAN-REVIEWED.
Why do you think the fucking internet is so insecure? 99% of all active shitware originates from MALICIOUS ADS.
I run an online community and I fully support Google in going after these assholes. They've been spamming our forums for the Google hits (the website has a surprisingly good Google presence despite its relatively small size) and there hasn't been much I can do about it. I'm planning a massive upgrade to new software, which has been long overdue, and I hope it will fix the problem. I'll bet it's the same guys that have been trying to circumvent Google. I'll bet there's some way to use the DMCA anti-circumvention rules for good instead of evil.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Google already scans web pages for malware and bad stuff and warns people "this site could be dangerous".
If they aren't already running the "bad sites" database against the ad database (and blocking any ads that link to or reference content from a bad page) then they should be. Any ad web site that starts serving malware (either deliberatly or because of a hack) would have their ads removed from display until they fix their site to stop serving malware.
Legitimate-but-hacked sites would therefore have an incentive to keep their sites malware free or risk being blocked from Google Ads.
There is a clear conflict of interest.
Google makes money by pushing ads through.
Every ad it rejects, every warning it throws up to users, and every advertiser it cuts off, means less money for Google.
We already know it is ABSOLUTELY NOT the case that:
"Any ad web site that starts serving malware (either deliberatly or because of a hack) would have their ads removed from display until they fix their site to stop serving malware."
Compromised sites are compromised in the first place because of malicious ads. Their incentives to keep clean are protecting the site itself from denial of service/information theft, and keeping users of the site happy.
Indeed, the best way to keep your site safe and secure is to NOT HOST ANY ADS WHATSOEVER.
In theory, GP is correct.
However, if you commit insurance fraud you're most likely going to be hit with more than enough fines to make up for any refunds the insurance company owes you.
Also, the policy may have a clause that causes forfeiture of unused premiums in the event of fraud.
Also, the policy may have a clause that causes forfeiture of unused premiums in the event of fraud.
I'm betting this would be the case, and I'd bet that any law obligating an insurer to reimburse premiums pro rata would have a similar exception. Of course, ymmv.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.