Scareware Ads Keep Running on Google's Transparency Tool, Even After They're Reported

PhD candidate Ritik Roongta and Professor Rachel Greenstadt, with collaborators at Radboud University, built AdLens, an AI tool that screened 188,000 software ads in Google's public ad archive and flagged 238 scareware ads, 3,346 ads with false claims, and 258 ads designed to hide who placed them. Reporting the ads to Google often didn't get them removed: after the team reported one ad tied to a malware domain, 41 others pointing to the same domain kept running. "We have been extensively trying to reach out to Google's trust and safety team to figure out a better way to report these ads and the malicious urls to help in blanket blocking," Roongta said.