This from the Internet Crime Complaint Center.

It doesn't seem to be any sort of new wrinkle, or did I not read far enough?

No new wrinkle per se rather it is the fact the situation has reached a level where a federal agency, the FBI, has issued a warning and that warning has a significant negative impact on legitimate as well as fraudulent advertisers.

I don't read all that much, but from years of skimming, it seems to me that it may be more like the FBI has been remiss in not having "front paged" the problem long ago.

Maybe, but the FBI may be "front paging" now because so many companies have stopped doing the job themselves and have handed it all over to the FBI.

With bogus emails and phishing attempts that are constructed to look like legitimate companies, I have always forwarded the emails to "Report Phishing" links that the companies had. To make their job easier, I would also provide all the Header information. However, I am now finding that more and more companies are not bothering to investigate cases where they are impersonated. They no longer have the reporting links but instead advise: "Tell it to the Feds".

Perhaps the workload foisted onto the FBI has now become onerous and they are trying to reduce it by having people learn to look out for themselves.

Yes it has been going on for years, but in most cases it was not too difficult to spot the fakes for anyone at least marginally alert. Some of the stuff floating around these days is good enough to fool anyone other than the developer of the original and worse than that, the bogus stuff is finding its way into the legitimate advertising networks.


The companies for the most part are constrained by international borders and any hope of control and/or enforcement of standards requires international standing. As an agency of the United States government, the FBI has the standing to at least encourage not-so friendly nation-states to enforce international standards of conduct.

Not sure how this qualifies as an "Ad Blocker Threat". Quite the contrary: the advisory recommends using an Ad Blocker under Tips to Protect Yourself.

I don't see any ads that I don't actually seek out (and check out).

I also use uBlock Origin and am glad I do.

Every time I use a system which doesn't have an ad blocker installed, I see so many ads that it would give me a migraine (if I were prone to such) — I spend so much time hitting the [X] on ads that I usually give up on the sites which foster them.

And how do you seek them out? The point the FBI is making and is easy to overlook is...


This is not what we get foisted on us when visiting a known web site, it is what shows up at the top of the search engine listings along with the legitimate sites that have paid Google Et al. for placement at or near the top of the listings or in the sidebar. Which raises a host of other questions about how the fraudulent ads get included.

As noted, I check them out. I don't willy-nilly click on anything that shows up unless its patently legitimate.