08 Feb 2026 Search

From the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP): World of Scams: The Fraud Problem at the Heart of Online Advertising. The body of the report is an excellent summary of the fraud crisis. For those who read Mark Ritson’s Martin Lewis shouldn’t be alone in calling out Meta’s lucrative scam ads and want to catch up and see how bad it is, this is a good place to start. Consumers are the direct victims of the shift to a low-trust economy driven by Big Tech, but legit businesses suffer, too. The CAMP report explains:

Scams also represent an unnecessary tax on advertisers that depend on these platforms to reach their customers. Ad fraud, where fake users and websites extract money from real firms, cheats businesses, distorts markets, drives down revenues for legitimate publishers, and can be used to fund fraudulent activity. Because online advertising monopolies often represent both sides of the market, they can control the flow of information to both buyers and sellers of advertising. As a result, advertisers are given opaque information on audience quality and forced to compete with fraudsters who flood the market and hijack brand identities.

No wonder that at one recent conference, the top advice for students interested in marketing was to “pursue an electrician career” insteadI wish I had better news on the whole quit marketing and become an electrician thing. So what to do about it? CAMP has some doable policy recommendations, including:

The catch with most of this stuff is that scams and privacy harms perpetrated against users are generally downstream of some kind of scheme to cheat advertisers. If Canada (and US state legislators) can take some basic steps to protect small businesses, they can squeeze out a lot of the privacy issues as a side effect. More: a privacy law shortcut