Search For the Next Scam
Last month, this newsletter cited a case successfully brought by the DOJ against a network of credit rating companies that used fake apartment rental listing ads to lure customers into payments and subscriptions that were practically impossible to cancel.
Well, the DOJ is back and taking another crack at Google Search scam artists with a case filed this week against Yosef Bernath, the owner of an Illinois-based home services company, for alleged advertising and consumer fraud.
The scheme involved setting up thousands of fake business accounts on Google for electrical repairs, plumbing, HVAC installation, etcetera. Bernath and his accomplices would then submit false five-star ratings and reviews. Victims would call after seeing a service’s sponsored ad on Google and pay over the phone for specialists who never appeared.
One man was scammed after searching for “Electrical Service in Horton Texas” and later showed up to complain at the listed address, which turned out to be a donut shop. He was so ticked off that he dug into the Illinois-based company’s business records and reached overseas customer support to cancel a subscription. As an example of what it took.
And the man was not alone. The DOJ alleges that more than 100,000 Americans called the fake services supplier and tens of millions of dollars may have been stolen.
The Dark Side Of Data
Ask a brand marketer and an ICE official to describe their respective jobs in one sentence and you might hear two strikingly similar answers. Both analyze device data to determine who to target. The main difference, of course, is their intent.
In national intelligence circles, the practice of gathering information through commercial data brokers and ad tech vendors has its own acronym: ADINT. It stands for “advertising intelligence.”
For example, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement now has a dataset of roughly 20 million potential people to detain, including personal addresses, 404 Media reports. Where does this data come from?
ICE gets it through a partnership with Palantir, which, according to Matthew Elliston, assistant director of law enforcement systems and analysis at ICE, has increased the enforcement agency’s success rate for locating targets from roughly 27% to nearly 80%.
Elliston and others were apparently bragging about this at Border Security Expo in Phoenix last week.
Guess one person’s deterministic attribution is another’s search and seizure.
Have TikTok, Will Travel
Love living vicariously through idyllic vacation videos on TikTok? Well, now TikTok will let you book your own trips through its platform – although no guarantees they’ll be as idyllic.
On Tuesday, TikTok launched TikTok GO, a feature that lets users discover and book travel experiences and hotels directly on the app, TechCrunch reports. Launch partners include Booking.com, Expedia, Viator, GetYourGuide, Tiqets and Trip.com.
Much like TikTok Shop, GO is another example of TikTok building closed-loop solutions for browsing and completing purchases without leaving its walled garden. TikTok can then use the purchase data it collects for ad targeting and optimization. The same dynamic was at play when TikTok struck a partnership with Ticketmaster in 2022 to enable in-app concert ticket and event bookings.
It’s a little tricky, though. As TechCrunch notes, TikTok will be competing with its travel partners, which also want to own those direct customer relationships and the data that comes with them.
But TikTok GO also gives the app a new way to compete with Google, which has long supported travel bookings directly from search results. Not unlike how TikTok supplanted Google as a preferred search platform for Gen Z, TikTok is now angling to crowd Google out of travel.
But Wait! There’s More!
With ad-supported tiers now representing 50% of all streaming service signups, streaming ad spend should nearly equal TV ad spend by 2029, according to Madison and Wall. [WSJ]
Is there accountability in ad tech’s agentic era? [Digiday]
Meta is testing a chatbot that’s integrated into Threads, similar to Grok on X — and Threads users are mad they can’t block it. [Engadget]
Feeling like your events calendar couldn’t be more crowded? Well, it’s about to get even worse, with revenue-strapped digital publishers turning to live events to get the most value out of their audiences. [The Rebooting]
You’re Hired!
Ian Colley, who recently stepped down as CMO of The Trade Desk, will now lead marketing at health care DSP DeepIntent. [Adweek]
Atmosphere TV hires Lindsay Sutton as SVP of marketing. [release]
Performance CTV company Keynes promotes Daniella Romanaggi to COO and Scott Shepard to VP of measurement and CTV. [release]
Newsletter platform Beehiiv brings on former Paramount and NPR exec Ainsley Rossitto as head of podcasts. [Variety]
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