How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads

soltanov

Google treats its customers so blindly. in short, Google is not user centric company at all.

faeyanpiraat

Neat terminal, I've been building the same thing in my free time but haven't reached a point where it is complete / stable enough for being my daily driver. Have you (anyone) actually sticked to the way of working this enables, or is this just a gimmick?

rvz

Maybe Google have detectors of some sites that are mostly vibe-coded also being associated with AI slop. Also why use Google Ads in the first place? Given that HNers and technical users are extremely allergic to that?

OptionX

Google is the worst offender, but a lot of companies are increasingly hiding themselves behind a wall of automated systems to completely neuter users ability to challenge any decision unilaterally taken by the them. The LLM-age has worsen the situation but it started well before it. At some point it may be necessary to add the requirement for large companies to have a both human contact point and perhaps a requirement for specifics on account terminations and the like, or at least a way to request them, to the letter of the law.

1970-01-01

Google has forgotten the plot. A quick tangent story follows: I attempted to add a Tesla Supercharger as it went live to Google Maps. I was the very first to pay to recharge at the new location. The process went something like this: 1st time: Uploaded 4 photos, local business info, current charger prices, and GPS coordinates. Google replied this would be sent to human review. It was rejected within 6 minutes. 2nd attempt: Uploaded 6 more photos, including shots of local business hours and info, and current prices. Rejected in 6 minutes. 3rd time: One photo of a new charger, no description. Rejected in 6 minutes. 4th time: Appended all above details to local business info. It went live within a minute. 5 days later: Supercharger location was added by ??? and included no info at all and the pinpoint was off by 100m.

huhtenberg

We had that, almost a decade ago. The cause was that the site was in fact compromised and at a certain very discreet URL it hosted a bunch of pages for legit products that linked to external shady sites. They got in through some PHP hole. Got lucky they didn't do more damage. However as per various Google pages and dashboards no issues were present except being tagged as a malware distribution site. The remedy was to audit the site, clean it up and then re-submit the appeal. Got the tag cleared in a couple hours.

kg

Behavior like Google's monopolistic behavior here in turn enables other monopolies - if distributing your own software puts you at risk of being arbitrarily banned by advertisers, deranked in search, blocked by virus scanners, etc without recourse, you're going to end up leaning on app stores like Steam, Google Play, etc because they have a shortcut through all the red tape.

customguy

I really wonder about these youtube ads for these (non-existing, AI slop) incel games... it's always the same pattern, a man is exploited and/or rejected by a woman who gets everything for free he has taken from him, is spat on and whatnot, then starts his quest to fight the demoness or whatever. Are there any articles about those and the companies behind them?

lorey

Had the same issue. In the end, getting pulled into some Google Ads sales funnel and them solving the issue through internal tickets helped. Spent $1000 on useless ads in the process, but have an "unlocked" account now. Really disappointing customer experience.

bede

FYI https://race-term.com is blocked by NCSC's Protective DNS service using my UK University's connection. Are you sure your domain is not blacklisted somewhere?

Toutouxc

That’s surprising, because in my opinion Google doesn’t care about malicious anything. The other day I had to look for something on YouTube on my dad’s computer with a disabled ad-blocker. I saw like 30 ads in 15 minutes, every single one of them was a scam, literally not a single non-fraudulent ad. Google is full cartoon villain evil at this point.

throwawayffffas

Check if chrome flags your site as malware. If it does, hire a lawyer and sue them for defamation.

andriamanitra

I'm guessing "race term" got automatically flagged because it can be understood as "word or expression that refers to a racial group or to race/ethnicity" i.e. an euphemism for a slur.

monegator

Ah yes, i got an account suspended on play console due to inactivity. The new help system has been "improved" in the sense that it is directly inside play console, so of course i can't appeal or request to reinstate or transfer the app ids to a new account, because THE CURRENT ACCOUNT IS CLOSED AND I AM ALWAYS REDIRECTED TO A PAGE THAT TELLS THAT THE ACCOUNT IS CLOSED. So i tried appealing using another console account. After about a week i got the usual automated response stating that my previous report was auto-translated into english (i wrote it in fucking english of course) and some generic babble about what happened. To which i replied that i have no problem opening a new account using the old email, but i'd want to know beforehand if i'd keep, or how to retain, the package IDs so it's not going to be a fucking painful mess to tell customers to reinstall. And of course i got the same autogenerated email, with a couple new lines summarizing the first part. I feel for the author, it is literally impossible to talk to a human there.

skylurk

> You can position and resize terminals freely instead of squeezing everything into a uniform grid yes please!

de6u99er

Google doesn't care. They advertise online betting to kids, because those platforms now have some "free" online games.

sspiff

They are begging you to spend your ad budget elsewhere.

delegate

Interestingly how everyone is talking about 'Google', this faceless entity.. but in essence there are humans who work there, employees not doing their job properly. Lazy, detached, disinterested .. with no consequences for coasting.. Or are badly organized/managed, have the wrong incentives, are burned out, going through a divorce, performance review, whatever.. People are people, life happens, job happens, but unfortunately some of these roles have real external impacts on other people. One demotivated employee at a Google* can radiate their unhappiness onto great number of others because of the circumstantial power they have at their disposal. At the very least they could copy & paste the exact reason for the ban, but no, they'll drag people through mud and automated replies, etc.

chrisgd

Anthropic is terrible too. I couldn’t rectify my spending versus my usage. Automated assistant shows me where things are that I am already asking about. Gets escalated and person doesn’t respond to my question. Back to automated with multiple requests to escalate before they will do it

xlii

I made an update, but I'll post also here in comments. It seems that either a human read it or it triggered some trigger, but my account has been reinstated. Thank you, also those who made this issue visible. On one side I'm happy it happened, on the other, it's a shame that it took complaining on the internet amplified by HackerNews to get this problem fixed...