Big Tech's role in enabling link fraud

by Sephr • 3 years ago

135 51 3 years ago

Sephr4• 3 years ago

Link fraud happens on adtech platforms owned by Google, Microsoft, X, and reddit.

They each allow advertisers to spoof links with unverified "vanity URLs", laundering trust in their systems, while simultaneously deflecting blame onto advertisers when these mechanisms are exploited for fraud.

You can help raise awareness by resharing/rehosting my message on social media and reaching out to your elected government officials. The systemic enablement of link fraud by Big Tech needs to end.

baxtr2• 3 years ago

Thanks. It would be great if you could provide some concrete examples. I have read the article but still don’t really understand how this works.

Examples help to explain it to other people who need to know.

TimPC• 3 years ago

Basically any URL shortener would be an example.

MOARDONGZPLZ• 3 years ago

This hacker news comment citing a peer reviewed study from the other time this article was posted gives a concrete example of how someone might fraudulently lead someone to a different than expected link: https://t.ly/77r6z

strictnein4• 3 years ago

Search: [retailer] gift card balance

Ad shows up:

   Text: Check Your [Retailer] Gift Card
   Display URL: https://www.[retailer].com/

Click the ad, get redirected to the malicious site: https://www.[retailer]-gift-card.com/

Ads always have redirection involved, typically through a third party, to track ROI, conversions, etc. How the attackers take advantage of this is their redirection redirects to the real site if it's the Googlebot or from an IP range known to be owned/used by Google (or other filtering based on location, language, etc). If it's not, it redirects to the malicious site.

One solution is that the first hop in the chain has to match the domain of the display URL. That at least somewhat shows you can have a redirection that you control on the display domain. Of course, there could be an open redirect on that display domain, but those are becoming increasingly rare.

Work for a large retailer and we dealt with this a lot a year or two ago. Built custom monitoring to detect it and we sent gobs of data back to Google showing it happening. Still pops up every once in a while, but they've made some improvements in their detection/prevention.

nradov• 3 years ago

Link fraud is a good thing because it undermines the advertising economy. Anything which causes consumers to mistrust and ignore advertising can only be a positive.

ClumsyPilot2• 3 years ago

If you can’t beat them, join them and insidiously undermine them.

winternett• 3 years ago

Big Tech doesn't just enable fraud, they collect a lot of profit off of it, and it wouldn't even surprise me if they ran a lot of it. They don't even counter bots and spam posts in many cases any more, they stifle creator post views, they also ran several pphony crypto and NFT marketing campaigns themselves which all bilked millions of people, there is little trust left for these tech companies now, especially the social media companies. They literally run fraud havens.

dimask• 3 years ago

Moreover, such links can be used to evade email filters that companies usually employ [1]. Combined with the habit of these corporate email services to obfuscate links "for safety", it can make it much easier to get tricked into being phished.

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/linkedin-smar...

charcircuit• 3 years ago

Google's policy is that both display and landing page URLs should be within the same website. This means that the display URL in your ad needs to match the domain that visitors land on when they click on your ad.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6246601?hl=en

The author paints the picture that bad actors can just use any URL when that does not seem to be the case.

strictnein4• 3 years ago

See my comment here on how they get around that:

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39006581

sokoloff• 3 years ago

You meant to link to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39006581

Sephr4• 3 years ago

This means that the display URL in your ad needs to match the domain that visitors land on when they click on your ad.

This policy is fundamentally impossible to enforce without domain ownership verification. 'It is against our policy' isn't exactly a good excuse when said policy isn't technically enforceable.

Google practices sampled URL resolution (which is insufficient as explained in my blog post) and does not currently require domain ownership verification for the use of vanity URLs.

andersa• 3 years ago

I don't get it. Solving this is trivial. Simply display the url that the ad links to. Why the hell is it configurable?

godelski4• 3 years ago

It amazes how many blatantly fraudulent spam twitter accounts there are, with links not even masked behind url shorteners. Every single day I get these accounts liking random comments of mine and these are so bad they can be caught by naive bayes filtering. Here's some examples[0] that all have a ".click" domain and their bios are very clearly spammy.

But I think my favorite is that I have messages that Twitter classified as spam, and that I have reported these profiles, but months later they still exist. Profiles that are even clones![1] What's even more funny is that when I originally got the message from this person twitter would suggest similar profiles and I could see 30 others with the exact same profile picture, all created in the same month, all without any activity, and all with the same pattern of name + random number string.

I agree with the article's point, but I just want to point out here that there's even a far lower bar that these platforms are failing to achieve. If I'm reporting 5 people a week and those profiles still exist months later, clearly the platform is doing something wrong.

[0] https://twitter.com/Eleanor1541800, https://twitter.com/Eva626692385410, https://twitter.com/Serenity1260229

[1] https://twitter.com/ReneeYoung71651, https://twitter.com/Jessica77414656, https://twitter.com/Jessica43172228

padolsey• 3 years ago

Yep I've encountered so so many of these too. It's amazing how obvious they are even to the most primitive filter, so I'm just at a complete loss as to why X/Twitter is so disincentivized to fix it ... especially given Elon's spiel about removing bots from the platform.

godelski4• 3 years ago

Yeah I've never had much faith in Elon. Always seems to care more about what is said than what is done. I'm just surprised people still believe him considering he's promised so much and delivered so little. I mean not that he hasn't done stuff, but he promises far more. But I guess he's the richest man alive and I'm not, so what do I know.

pjc50• 3 years ago

Quite a lot of them even have blue ticks, meaning they're paying for the privilege.

It all stems from the "free speech" unwillingness to ban accounts, and gutting the account-banning teams. As well as the very real problem that some of the big grifters that he loves on the platform also love their inflated follower counts.

gloryjulio• 3 years ago

I don't think Elon cares about those profiles. The more activities the better

magicalhippo• 3 years ago

He paid good money for all those Twitter profiles, only fair to expect him to want to have all of them around.

pants2• 3 years ago

YouTube had this same issue for years to the point where various creators had scripts they would run constantly to clean the spam out of their video comments using very simple filters. It's amazing the apathy that big tech companies have to this sort of problem.

Wonder why HN doesn't have the same spam problem? Because Dang actually cares about the site's content quality and not about quarterly user growth :)

6510• 3 years ago

One terrible version here in NL were free to call phone numbers starting with 0800 usually followed by 4 digits. Google allowed to spoof those and point them at 1 euro per minute phone numbers. They just redirected to the free number. Lots of people I know got weird phone bills for numbers they've never seen before. For some of these, during rush hour, 20-30 min waiting time is normal.

A 2022 law now forbids people with paid numbers to redirect to 0800 free to call numbers.

I'm really curious how much money this google scam made. If I know 5 people who spend 20-40 euro on it there must be many thousands of victims.

The ads spoofed things like the tax office. First thing in the morning that number alone gets thousands of calls. One just types "tax office phone" (in dutch) in the search box and the ad says 0800-0543 You click on it and get the tax office. You might have to wait a bit because they are very patient and try to answer all your questions to the best of their ability, put you on hold to ask around etc Some people must repeatedly call the number for more than a hour in the same month. They wont notice anything until the bill comes in.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

"I anticipate that the US federal government may start requiring adblockers on all federal employee devices at some point in the future."

nyanpasu642• 3 years ago

Was the previous submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38916266 a draft for this article? That article has formatting errors (Helvetica text) and is not in the site's article index.

Sephr4• 3 years ago

Yes. My original draft addressed too many issues at once and didn't receive enough engagement on HN. I re-drafted it to be easier to understand the key points. The improved accessibility seems to have helped.

Also, thank you for noting the formatting error in my previous article. I just fixed it.

cstrat• 3 years ago

Twitter enables this through not checking the account in a URL... a simple fix would be to actually respect the Twitter URL components, if the account doesnt match the linked tweet, don't redirect...

Right now you can spoof (just as far as the URL displayed in an anchor tag) the account to be whatever you like:

Example:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1745190441539293271

This will redirect you to the following, but as content within a tweet, it will look like a legit post from Elon. Crypto-scams are using this in every single post.

https://twitter.com/ElonMuskAOC/status/1745190441539293271

est• 3 years ago

Fraud is one thing, but be warned, any anti-fraud measurements can be also used for speech censorship.

palmfacehn• 3 years ago

I dislike spam as much as the next person, but the article makes some serious leaps. Demanding that the governments regulate hyperlinks while decrying "regulatory capture" feels like a non-sequitur. Moreover, it isn't immediately clear how vanity URLs or redirects are part of regulatory capture. However, it is easy to see how inviting regulation of hyperlinks could lead to regulatory capture.

Sephr4• 3 years ago

I'm demanding that existing laws be enforced. Adtech has created a system that systemically enables normal fraud in the context of links. This is not a unique concept, nor does not require any new regulations or laws to address.

Big Tech is deflecting blame by pretending that these problems (that they also made) cannot be solved. Government agencies believe these claims, which results in situations like the FBI asking you to install an adblocker.

Big Tech's role in enabling link fraud

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