happy holiday shopping season in the low-trust economy

Happy holiday shopping season. In case you missed it, here’s a warning on the Chase site.

Scammers create ads on social media offering merchandise at great prices and set up bogus websites that all look exactly like genuine retailers.

You can put the don’t buy stuff from social media ads warning up next to the Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches warning from the FBI, I guess.

The really interesting part of the flood of scam ads on search and social is how consumers and legit companies are adapting. During the create more value than you capture days, big Internet companies got people to expect convenient access to accurate information and a useful social graph. Now that Google and Meta have chosen to take those away, people still want them but where to get them isn’t as obvious.

That’s a huge opportunity—and it comes just in time, as customer acquisition costs on search and social are getting unsustainable anyway.

(I still think one of the big banks should have their own web browser optimized for anti-fraud. It would pay for itself just on support, and any upsells to payment platform integration would be pure upside. If J. P. Morgan were alive today he’d see the scam crisis as an opportunity.)

Bonus links

Guest Post: A Former Meta Integrity Leader Fights For Transparency by Rob Leathern. The nonprofit we started is either (a) our attempt, with plenty of inside knowledge, to move towards building tools that help industry self-regulate itself better and perhaps avoid bright line bans… by opening content to third parties (like us) who can measure how good of a job companies do, and/or (b) the data we find will help make it clear that companies just simply are NOT doing enough.

How Google fooled Brussels: the tech giant’s playbook exposed by Alexander Fanta. An investigation by Follow the Money – based on U.S. court documents, EU lobby files, and expert interviews – reveals how Google has convinced politicians and the public that innovation, rather than dubious business practices, cemented its dominance. (fan theory: Google started legit, then pivoted to crime, but could go legit again.)