Recently it was announced that Facebook had started to ban ads about ICO and cryptocurrency, and it seems that they are not alone in this. Google is also said to be cracking down on similar ads, although in Google’s case it seems that they aren’t going to the extremes of banning ads like what Facebook is doing.Instead it seems that Google has created policies that will help their advertising team weed out abuse in advertisements that are related to cryptocurrencies. This is due to the fact that there are quite a number of bad actors out there who are taking advantage of the hype surrounding cryptocurrencies to put out misleading or deceptive ads, or even ads that could secretly use the viewer’s computing power to help mine for cryptocurrencies.
While not related to a Google or Facebook ad, hijacking an unsuspecting user’s computing power to mine for cryptocurrency isn’t new. Last year there was an incident where a public WiFi provider for Starbucks in an outlet at Buenos Aires was discovered to be mining for bitcoin using the computers of users who connected to it.
In a statement a Google spokesperson provided to Fast Company, “Mining cryptocurrency through ads is a relatively new form of abuse that violates our policies and one that we’ve been monitoring actively. We enforce our policies through a multi-layered detection system across our platforms which we update as new threats emerge.”
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