Scareware ads keep running on Google's transparency tool, even after they're reported
NYU and Radboud researchers built AdLens, which found 238 scareware and 3,346 false-claim ads in Google's ad archive; reported ads often stayed live.
The AdLens tool, built by NYU and Radboud University researchers, mined Google's Ads Transparency Center and screened 188,000 software ad creatives using similarity search plus a panel of open-source language models, finding 238 scareware ads, 3,346 false-claim ads, and 258 anonymity-avoiding ads with over 100 million impressions in Europe. Reporting ads through Google's standard flow produced inconsistent removals: some ads acknowledged as violations stayed live, and after one takedown tied to the TamperedChef malware domain, 41 other ads pointing to the same domain kept running. The pipeline runs entirely on open-weight models at low cost (a $96 DigitalOcean VM plus $1.57/hour L40S inference) and is designed to extend to Meta and Amazon ad libraries.
- AdLens screened 188,000 Google ad creatives using similarity search and open-weight LLMs
- Flagged ads drew over 100 million EU impressions; one false-claim ad ran 2+ years with 14.5M impressions
- Google reports produced inconsistent removals; domain-level blocking proposed but hard due to rotating registrars
- Landing pages tied to protective-DNS-flagged domains, including one from the TamperedChef malware campaign
- Pipeline extendable to Meta and Amazon ad libraries; video support planned
- Vendors
- GoogleDigitalOcean
- Products
- AdLensAds Transparency Center
- Malware
- TamperedChef
- Organizations
- NYURadboud University
- Countries
- France
From the original article
4 min read at helpnetsecurity.com
A team of NYU and Radboud University researchers spent a year building a tool to find deceptive software ads inside Google’s public ad archive. It works. It also exposed something more uncomfortable: reporting a bad ad to Google doesn’t mean the ad, or the domain behind it, stops running.
By @helpnetsecurity · helpnetsecurity.com
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