You know better than to trust a stranger who messages you out of nowhere. But the ad at the top of your search results, the one with the familiar logo and the tempting price, was bought too. Increasingly, the buyer is a criminal.
What is actually going on
Ads on social media, in search results and on shopping sites are not chosen for you because they are good. Companies bid for the space, and the platform decides who sees which ad using what it already knows about you: your age, the pages you visit, what you have bought before. When you search for something, an ad can be placed in front of you within a second, written for the thing you were about to do anyway.
That system has no way of knowing whether the buyer is honest. According to America’s Federal Trade Commission, the government agency that polices advertising and consumer fraud there, scammers are now paying for the same placements, dressed as real companies and government offices. “Today’s impersonation scams are no longer the work of isolated con artists,” said Christopher Mufarrige, who runs the FTC’s consumer protection bureau. They are, he said, “sophisticated, highly engineered operations powered by the same advertising and targeting tools that platforms sell to legitimate businesses.”
The numbers are not small. In 2025 the FTC received more than a million reports about imposter scams, and people said they lost nearly 3.5 billion dollars. Nearly 30 percent of those who lost money said the first contact happened on social media, and those losses alone came to 2.1 billion dollars.
At the start of October the FTC opened a formal process to decide whether the platforms themselves should carry part of that responsibility. It is asking whether sites that sell ads should check advertisers before an ad runs, give people an easy way to report a fake one, and investigate and remove the fakes they find. The public comment window closes on 30 November.
Why it matters to you
A scam message has to interrupt you. A scam ad does not, because it arrives at the exact moment you were already looking. You search for a cheap flight, a winter coat, a replacement part, a tax refund. The thing that appears first looks like the answer to the question you typed.
Then comes the quiet part. You put your card details into a page with the right logo, the right colours, sometimes photographs copied from the real shop. The money leaves. There is no order, no refund desk, and often nobody to complain to, because the shop exists only as a page that will be deleted next week.
Government impersonation works the same way and costs more. An ad offers to renew a document or release a payment, asks for a small fee and a photo of your ID, and the details go to whoever bought the placement. The people hit hardest are older: the FTC reports that losses among people aged 60 and over rose from 600 million dollars in 2020 to about 3 billion dollars last year.
What you can actually do
None of this asks you to mistrust everything. It asks you to notice one label.
- Look for the word. Above a search result it usually says “Ad”, “Sponsored” or “Anzeige”; on social media the post itself is marked. If it carries that label, the company whose name is on it did not necessarily put it there.
- Do not tap the ad. Type the address you already know into the browser bar, or open the shop’s own app. You lose a few seconds and skip the entire problem.
- Read the address, not the logo. A fake shop often changes one letter, adds a hyphen, or swaps the ending. Check before you type a password or a card number, not after.
- Pay in a way that can be undone. A credit card or a payment service with buyer protection gives you a route back to your money. A bank transfer, a gift card or crypto does not, and no honest shop insists on them.
- Report the ad itself, not only the shop. Every platform has a small menu on the ad with a Report option. Reports are what trigger a review and a removal.
Common misunderstandings
Myth: “If it is at the top, it must be the real thing.”
The top of a page is sold, not earned. Being first means someone paid more, and that is as true for an honest company as for a fake one.
Myth: “I would spot a fake website.”
Most people would not, and that is the design. The logo, the fonts and the product photos are copied exactly. The reliable signals are the web address and the word “Ad”, not how professional the page looks.
Myth: “The platform must have checked who they are.”
There is no general rule that a platform has to verify an advertiser before the ad appears. That gap is exactly what the FTC is asking about, and it is why the label matters more than the brand.
What to watch for next
Comments close on 30 November, and any rule that comes out of this will take years, not weeks. Nothing changes on your phone in the meantime. Read the announcement as a signal about the direction rather than a fix.
What is likely to arrive sooner is the advertising itself. Expect more ads with a deadline attached (“ends tonight”), a phone number to call, and a form asking for a card. Those three together are the shape of the scam this proceeding is about.
The one thing to remember
An ad is not a recommendation. It is a purchase, made by someone who wants your attention and, often, your card details. The small label above it is the most useful thing on the page.
Image credit: “Hand holding smartphone with blank white screen” by Santeri Viinamäki, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.