I was listening to terrestrial radio the other day and was surprised to hear a radio advertisement beckoning retirees to cash in their 401ks to join the cryptocurrency future of Bitcoin and Ethereum. The bubble is too big for Google to slow it down and it has grown beyond the realm of tech savvy geeks into something fueled by hype and hubris.
>Internet rando 2: What about people who live under oppressed governments with unsound currency
>Me: Only if the problem with their currency is that it's not volatile enough and the transaction speeds are too fast
>"People are sick of the Federal Reserve, sick of bailouts, sick of inflation. You know what we need? Internet money with the usability of PGP and the stability of BART service"
Except paranoid dorks are not the ones scamming. It's a completely different group of people who created the space, and completely different one that twisted it into a farce, created thousands of scam ICOs and altcoins that make no sense. Well, some overlap actually might be there, but not that much.
> "People are sick of the Federal Reserve, sick of bailouts, sick of inflation. You know what we need? Internet money with the usability of PGP and the stability of BART service"
Why is something that paints anyone who has legitimate concerns about financial censorship and mass surveillance a "paranoid dork", one of the best tweet storms ever? It's exactly this kind of crude tribalism that prevents constructive civil discourse and encourages ideological narrow-mindedness and conformity.
I mean because yeah, fuck the paranoid dorks, right? /s
That's a closet NIMBY if I ever heard one. It was FINE when they were only stabbing each other in the bad neighbourhoods, but PLEASE leave the normal neighbourhoods alone!!!! NOW all of this has gone too far ...
I'm pleased to see that now that the price has fallen, the tone of BTC discussions in general has taken on a more sober tone amid the endless recriminations.
Google doesn't want to slow it down. They just don't want to be associated with companies that are related to fraud. And, I think that this is a valid and correct choice for Google because they have their own brand to protect.
There’s just too many poor ICOs launching and floating around for Google to moderate and police all the potential ads they’d buy. Google has shown no issue with deliberately reducing the service of it’s product to offset future headaches before.
I've tend to chat with drivers when I take Lyft, and frequently mention that I'm a programmer. Several of the drivers have then asked me about cryptocurrency, mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum. I try to discuss how technically interesting they are, but how financially shaky; that there is likely a bubble and that they are probably not good long term investment options but could be worth buying a little bit for fun.
We are definitely in a very hype driven cryptocurrency bubble right now, and there are a lot of naive folks who are probably going to lose money to it.
And yet somehow, we haven't really managed to make any cryptocurrencies an actual, widely accepted, payment alternative, for anyone other than a few people with special circumstances (government restrictions on currency exchange, criminals demanding ransoms, funding organizations that governments are trying to shut down) or people who are fairly technically competent.
There's a chance the lightning network could be the last piece of the puzzle to make cryptocurrencies actually usable for payment, though even still, I have a hard time seeing most places wanting to accept payment in an asset as volatile as Bitcoin.
Or maybe we'll see a coin backed by fiat currency and real, regulated banks on Stellar, where you don't have nearly the same scalability issues nor gigawatts of power wasted just to try to solve Sybil attacks. If you have a coin backed by fiat currency, and low transaction costs, businesses are a lot more likely to accept it as payment as most of their expenses, taxes, debts, and so on are in the local fiat currency rather than than in any cryptocurrency.
The frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it's poised to change the world in some very serious ways. People latch onto it because it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it.
People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially.
I hope that when regulators finally do step in, they are able to take actions that stop the scams without destroying the underlying technology.
> People latch onto it because it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it.
A few, but the vast majority have latched onto it because they think it will make them rich. Almost no one buying into cryptocurrencies could explain a blockchain if their life depended on it.
>The frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it's poised to change the world in some very serious ways.
This gets repeated ad nauseam. Maybe it might be time to consider that this tidal wave of scams IS the way the technology is changing the world?
> The frustrating bit is that these scams paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole. There's a lot of value to cryptocurrencies, and as a technology it's poised to change the world in some very serious ways. People latch onto it because it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it.
> People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially.
I accept your reasoning. But cryptography was all the time about how one can "scam" another person or prevent being scammed (where "scammed" in this case means e.g. that the cipher is broken).
To give a concrete example: MITM attacks on, say, Diffie-Hellman key exchange (just the standard textbook MITM attack if DH is used without any certificate) is in this wording just scamming the user that he has a secure connection while in reality someone can eavesdrop it or even modify sent messages. Of course the standard solution for this exact problem is to use X.509 certificates. But the "scamming" does not stop here: Of course a malicious person immediately thinks about more sophisticated attacks such as replay attacks to scam the user and again of course the protocols use methods to prevent this.
In this sense my counterclaim is that this does not "paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole", but just presents the "ordinary man" with what cryptography has been about for decades in a completely realistic (though in this case perhaps somewhar painful) way.
in Italy, which is not the heart of tech bubbles, there have been reports (I got a call too!) of telemarketers cold calling people to invest in cryptocurrencies.
I've received a couple in the UK. Low end telemarketers (overseas, poor English, zero knowledge of their subject matter) and clearly originating from random dialling or a list of mobile numbers without names, so making traditional boiler room operations seem sophisticated.
Anecdotal, but I have an uncle who, is a very good man but completely illiterate in terms of technology and closely resembles a "Larry the cable guy" stereotype, bought a surprising amount of bitcoin and then called me to ask how it worked, what make the price change, etc.
It seems shoe shiners can come in many forms. But that was the particular one for me to unload all of my bitcoin and other crypto and get out while I was ahead.
Watched some CNBC yesterday - that channel is about 1/3 cryptocurrencies now. Ads, news, and the "crypto guy" who comes on and tells you to buy monero.
FM radio ads trying to scam retirees? Wow, it's hard to go lower than that, but people have managed. John Oliver's recent segment on crypto was mostly intro-level, but he managed to dig up a video ad for a pump-and-dump ring. It wasn't at all wink-and-nudge or euphemistic: they pretty much flat out said "join our group to pump and dump cryptocurrencies and shaft some rubes."
I'll be surprised if the whole space doesn't completely crater sometime this year, a bunch of ordinary people get shafted, and the SEC steps in and knocks some heads. There's no way I'm getting near this until after the dust settles.
There is the "bubble" word again. So how about our economy, isn't that a bubble too?
What is a bubble? I still see too many places in the world where the sales price for a house is easily 10x the price it actually cost to build it. Banks? Quantitative easing? Startup's? Or at what point will Google look like a bubble itself?
Governments and Banks have learned that the crypto-currency revolution can replace a significant part of our current economy. Whether that's good or bad news, calling it a bubble is foolish and cheap IMHO.
Good. I accidentally turned off my ad-blocker a few days ago. Almost all the ads I saw were variants on "Be paid for using your phone - download our app to mine crypto!"
I've worked in ad-tech. Part of the problem is the scale is too large for advertising networks to check all the adverts. If you run a newspaper, you get to see and approve the ads before running with them.
Online, at best, an advertising network might see the initial ad & landing page, but then it is rapidly changed once live.
After Facebook announced it would stop crypto adverts I continued to see them for quite a while.
Facebook detects text in ads and will alert you when there is too much. I imagine it also reads that text and therefore would be quite easy to auto flag ads with "ICO" "Crypto" "Coin" in them.
I believe this to be a good decision. Investment should not be driven by advertisement but by facts. In my experience, any investment advertisement tying to appeal to mass audiences is fraud. This is no different for cryptocurrencies and reminds me of the penny stock scams.
Going to disagree with you. Doctors often have incentives to prescribe certain drugs over others that aren’t necessarily the best drug. If it’s legal to advertise to physicians then it should be legal to advertise to consumers. Ultimately the consumer is in charge of their own health and should have a say in their drug choices.
Let’s think of another industry — tires. Is a consumer typically an automotive engineer or a mechanic? Then why should it be legal to advertise tires to consumers? Ultimately a mechanic will have to install the tires. However, that certainly shouldn’t preclude a consumer making their preferences known. With meds, a doctor can always say no — and they should and do if it isn’t indicated for the particular affliction.
The idea that consumers need to be shielded from information is a bit weird to me.
> Investment should not be driven by advertisement but by facts. In my experience, any investment advertisement tying to appeal to mass audiences is fraud.
That's just not how advertising works. Investments are products like anything else and advertising is literally designed to expand the number of people who might purchase a product. You can say this about any product with differing utility among possible users.
> Truck buying should not be driven by advertisement but by facts. In my experience, any truck advertisement tying to appeal to mass audiences is fraud.
I don't need a truck to live in the city, but that doesn't mean Chevy should be banned from running advertisements in a city.
In case you didn't know, most investment decisions are made by advertising or access.
If you step into a large bank, they'll tend to get a cut on each fund they sell you -- whether that is a good fund or a bad. Often these funds are also run by the bank, and they charge excessive fees for managing.
An asset is something that puts money in your pocket. A liability is something that takes money from your pocket. Unless you are a professional runner or buying rare vintage sneakers — buying shoes isn’t “an investment.”
What I think is most bizarre - I have friends with really decent businesses that try really, really hard to get a few hundred thousand in funding. And yet I see the most _terrible_ ideas with an ICO cap of 20 million dollars. Still people throw in the cash. Ideas with literally no need for a blockchain. But "everyone will be able to spend the token on [insert terrible idea]!"
'The most bespoke electric hypercar! With blockchain!' http://www.arrinera.io/ - I mean really?! I heard someone talking about "LGBT on the blockchain" the other day - "We'll aim for a conservative $40million ICO." Ridiculous.
> decent businesses that try really, really hard to get a few hundred thousand in funding
At a certain point I have to wonder if this is working along the lines of a lemon market. Coin investors don't know for certain whether they're being scammed, so they want an offer that will have positive expectation even after adjusting for scam risk. But founders do know, somewhat, the value of their ideas - and honest players are bounded by what they can actually return, while the deluded or dishonest can promise the moon. Eventually it only becomes possible to get investments by lying to people.
There are forces that should act as a brake here, of course; a sober idea asking for $200k ought to have lower risk than a stupid idea asking for $20M. But for some reason, that sort of risk discrimination isn't really happening at the moment. Maybe investors are over-eager, maybe the scam rate is so high at all price points to bury useful information, but it certainly looks like bad ideas are actually doing better.
People aren't buying those coins because they think there's a good idea there. They're buying them because they think they'll get rich quick and be able to cash out.
If you're not an accredited investor and want to invest in a startup you don't have many options. Cryptocurrencies unlock that for a lot of people, even if the startups are absolutely awful.
I'd actually go as far as to say that ICOs are fraudulent by nature. The ones that are not fraudulent by intent just have no idea what they are actually doing.
They know exactly what they are doing. They are raising massive funds in an extremely short period of time with no direct obligation to provide returns to shareholders.
Mixed feelings on this one. Most of them are likely to be scams as its so easy to do. But there are also things like the Brave browser[1] with its BAT(Basic Attention Token)[2], which am very excited about. With the Ad revenue on Internet falling all around, with Ad-blockers increasing. Brave, with BAT, provides a new way for publishers to get paid. Interestingly it also has the potential to disrupt Google's Adsense model. So there is an interesting element of incumbent (Google) and disruptor (brave) in there.
The vast majority of cryptocurrency advertising is aimed directly at taking advantage of investors who probably don't know how to do proper diligence on such an early and untested technology.
I would put this squarely in the same vein as ads that might encourage you to 'buy our gemstone, it's going to be the new diamond'. Or 'our baseball cards are first edition and guaranteed to go up in value', etc.
Did Google ban all scam ads out there? Is predatory lending banned? How about magical thinking supplements, systems, and other scams?
Also, wallets? What did the crypto wallet makers do wrong?
This, my friends, is monopoly capitalism at its finest; when corporate interests are threatened they come down on information exchange, which means they can disappear products. And since it's privately owned and not state owned, everyone's okay with it morally. Because cryptocurrency is naughty.
Let's ban drug discussion, too, it's naughty. How about hate speech, let's disappear search results for that. Who needs Big Brother when a massive surveillance apparatus that, quite frankly, is a headache to avoid (although I use duckduckgo and Firefox for all non tech stuff) can also disappear ideas and products without a popular vote or accountability?
One plus of all this is I won't have to see the Crypto Genius Reveals Next Bitcoin ad with the pic of the guy staring off in the distance in crooked glasses. Always hated that one.
Are you proposing that an ad for a placebo is as damaging as an ad encouraging people to gamble their life savings (bonus: on what may be nothing more than a pump and dump scheme)?
As an aside, I'm not sure what drug discussion or hate speech has to do with this at all.
Peter Hetherington, chief executive of IG Group, Europe’s largest retail trading website, said consumers would be “more likely to end up with reputable brokers and proper regulatory protection” following the changes.
But he warned that there were wider implications for financial services, saying: “Big American tech companies are increasingly influential in deciding how financial services products are marketed. This is fine if they get to the right answer . . . but a worrying precedent if they do not, since the normal checks and balances do not apply to their decisions.”
("Google to ban cryptocurrency adverts", Financial Times, March 15, 2018)
You've missed the point and are throwing a false equivalence argument at me. It's not about what's bad or not bad, it's about a non-elected, unaccountable corporation deciding what (non-illegal) content to make vanish. Just because you think all cryptocurrency is a scam doesn't mean it is. My drug discussion example is another example of protecting people from themselves (in the same way you want to protect them from the cryptocurrency world because your personal feelings have directed you towards the word 'damaging').
I support the ability for Google to make this decision but we should not be celebrating this as a good thing. Instead, it should strike fear. Google has a disproportionate amount of influence through its ads and cannot act in the best interest of all individuals.
The harms deriving from the possibility of doing bad must be balanced against the harms deriving from unwillingness to do good. Allowing toxic ads should strike fear as well, that browsing online is an unsafe "back alley" full of scams.
Since Facebook banned them I've seen a surge in them on Twitter. Will be interesting to see what they do, and whether it contributes anything meaningful to their profit situation.
I'm actually glad Google are (at least for the time being). Whilst rogue ICOs and crypto-pumpers are still working their stuff, the market is much more akin to back-street gambling and since there are already regs on AdWords for unsavoury ads, this fits the bill.
I see lots of ICO ads on Instagram, which uses Facebook's ad network. Probably they banned them only on Facebook, not in their ad network completely, or just lots of ads left unbanned.
Also lots of russian money scam ads posted from temporary accounts, this may be explanation why ICOs aren't banned too: they ban, but new ads are posted again and again.
We've created a generation of people who will do anything they are told to do. Now these big corps and governments feel like they have to baby-proof the world because we've created a bunch of lemmings who will give all their money to an ICO because a banner told them to.
> we've created a bunch of lemmings who will give all their money to an ICO because a banner told them to.
It is a problem of basic finance education which should be part of the school curriculum. People also buy a lot of stuff they don't need or include false claims because a banner told them to.
And then the legal system is structured to essentially allow this behaviour because it's not worth the time or effort in most cases, and the system is designed for settlement, not for justice - settlement which most often requires agreeing to silence - which then prevents society from getting educated/learning of these problems.
I was just saying this the other day. I have been a steep learning curve about retirement accounts, mortgages, etc. There should really be a financial curriculum in high school, possibly all four years. This is basic information that everyone should be aware of.
It's because if you start getting people to think critically about economics they will start to wonder why they are spending 40 hours a week working and getting no royalties(hint hint engineers).
Okay multiple generations of people who will do whatever an ad or authority figure tells them to.
Not sure SEC is a good example, since they are a corrupt organization focused on prohibiting class mobility. Their propaganda works better than ads on the same people.
Readit News
https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/953464303960469504
> All of this has gone too far!!!!! It was fine when you paranoid dorks were out there scamming each other, please leave the normies alone!!!!!!!!!!!
>Internet rando 2: What about people who live under oppressed governments with unsound currency
>Me: Only if the problem with their currency is that it's not volatile enough and the transaction speeds are too fast
>"People are sick of the Federal Reserve, sick of bailouts, sick of inflation. You know what we need? Internet money with the usability of PGP and the stability of BART service"
That's a closet NIMBY if I ever heard one. It was FINE when they were only stabbing each other in the bad neighbourhoods, but PLEASE leave the normal neighbourhoods alone!!!! NOW all of this has gone too far ...
Deleted Comment
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Love it, thanks for sharing.
It does seem like she is making the mistake of conflating Bitcoin with general crypto however, which can be misleading to her audience.
Bitcoin indeed suffers from slow transaction speeds and extreme volatility.
Other coins, truer to the original vision, fair much better in those respects, and with wide adoption and usage, the volatility would subside.
More specifically, Google doesn't want the SEC to hold them liable when they go after some of these fraudsters.
We are definitely in a very hype driven cryptocurrency bubble right now, and there are a lot of naive folks who are probably going to lose money to it.
And yet somehow, we haven't really managed to make any cryptocurrencies an actual, widely accepted, payment alternative, for anyone other than a few people with special circumstances (government restrictions on currency exchange, criminals demanding ransoms, funding organizations that governments are trying to shut down) or people who are fairly technically competent.
There's a chance the lightning network could be the last piece of the puzzle to make cryptocurrencies actually usable for payment, though even still, I have a hard time seeing most places wanting to accept payment in an asset as volatile as Bitcoin.
Or maybe we'll see a coin backed by fiat currency and real, regulated banks on Stellar, where you don't have nearly the same scalability issues nor gigawatts of power wasted just to try to solve Sybil attacks. If you have a coin backed by fiat currency, and low transaction costs, businesses are a lot more likely to accept it as payment as most of their expenses, taxes, debts, and so on are in the local fiat currency rather than than in any cryptocurrency.
I have an even harder time seeing any of those people who invest in bitoin using their coins for purchases.
People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially.
I hope that when regulators finally do step in, they are able to take actions that stop the scams without destroying the underlying technology.
A few, but the vast majority have latched onto it because they think it will make them rich. Almost no one buying into cryptocurrencies could explain a blockchain if their life depended on it.
This gets repeated ad nauseam. Maybe it might be time to consider that this tidal wave of scams IS the way the technology is changing the world?
Dead Comment
> People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially.
I accept your reasoning. But cryptography was all the time about how one can "scam" another person or prevent being scammed (where "scammed" in this case means e.g. that the cipher is broken).
To give a concrete example: MITM attacks on, say, Diffie-Hellman key exchange (just the standard textbook MITM attack if DH is used without any certificate) is in this wording just scamming the user that he has a secure connection while in reality someone can eavesdrop it or even modify sent messages. Of course the standard solution for this exact problem is to use X.509 certificates. But the "scamming" does not stop here: Of course a malicious person immediately thinks about more sophisticated attacks such as replay attacks to scam the user and again of course the protocols use methods to prevent this.
In this sense my counterclaim is that this does not "paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole", but just presents the "ordinary man" with what cryptography has been about for decades in a completely realistic (though in this case perhaps somewhar painful) way.
This genuinely frightened me.
The cases they told about were pure scams where the fraudsters stole the cryptocurrencies directly.
It seems shoe shiners can come in many forms. But that was the particular one for me to unload all of my bitcoin and other crypto and get out while I was ahead.
I'll be surprised if the whole space doesn't completely crater sometime this year, a bunch of ordinary people get shafted, and the SEC steps in and knocks some heads. There's no way I'm getting near this until after the dust settles.
He is the spokesman/brand ambassador for "Bitcoiin".
Yes that is two "I"s.
Dead Comment
There is the "bubble" word again. So how about our economy, isn't that a bubble too?
What is a bubble? I still see too many places in the world where the sales price for a house is easily 10x the price it actually cost to build it. Banks? Quantitative easing? Startup's? Or at what point will Google look like a bubble itself?
Governments and Banks have learned that the crypto-currency revolution can replace a significant part of our current economy. Whether that's good or bad news, calling it a bubble is foolish and cheap IMHO.
Dead Comment
I've worked in ad-tech. Part of the problem is the scale is too large for advertising networks to check all the adverts. If you run a newspaper, you get to see and approve the ads before running with them.
Online, at best, an advertising network might see the initial ad & landing page, but then it is rapidly changed once live.
Facebook detects text in ads and will alert you when there is too much. I imagine it also reads that text and therefore would be quite easy to auto flag ads with "ICO" "Crypto" "Coin" in them.
Let’s think of another industry — tires. Is a consumer typically an automotive engineer or a mechanic? Then why should it be legal to advertise tires to consumers? Ultimately a mechanic will have to install the tires. However, that certainly shouldn’t preclude a consumer making their preferences known. With meds, a doctor can always say no — and they should and do if it isn’t indicated for the particular affliction.
The idea that consumers need to be shielded from information is a bit weird to me.
That's just not how advertising works. Investments are products like anything else and advertising is literally designed to expand the number of people who might purchase a product. You can say this about any product with differing utility among possible users.
> Truck buying should not be driven by advertisement but by facts. In my experience, any truck advertisement tying to appeal to mass audiences is fraud.
I don't need a truck to live in the city, but that doesn't mean Chevy should be banned from running advertisements in a city.
Those are clearly not fraudulent.
That said, the crypto ads are less like that & more like the auction prize site ads, so good riddance.
If you step into a large bank, they'll tend to get a cut on each fund they sell you -- whether that is a good fund or a bad. Often these funds are also run by the bank, and they charge excessive fees for managing.
'The most bespoke electric hypercar! With blockchain!' http://www.arrinera.io/ - I mean really?! I heard someone talking about "LGBT on the blockchain" the other day - "We'll aim for a conservative $40million ICO." Ridiculous.
At a certain point I have to wonder if this is working along the lines of a lemon market. Coin investors don't know for certain whether they're being scammed, so they want an offer that will have positive expectation even after adjusting for scam risk. But founders do know, somewhat, the value of their ideas - and honest players are bounded by what they can actually return, while the deluded or dishonest can promise the moon. Eventually it only becomes possible to get investments by lying to people.
There are forces that should act as a brake here, of course; a sober idea asking for $200k ought to have lower risk than a stupid idea asking for $20M. But for some reason, that sort of risk discrimination isn't really happening at the moment. Maybe investors are over-eager, maybe the scam rate is so high at all price points to bury useful information, but it certainly looks like bad ideas are actually doing better.
Dead Comment
[1] https://brave.com/
[2] https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#meaning
edit: typo
I would put this squarely in the same vein as ads that might encourage you to 'buy our gemstone, it's going to be the new diamond'. Or 'our baseball cards are first edition and guaranteed to go up in value', etc.
Also, wallets? What did the crypto wallet makers do wrong?
This, my friends, is monopoly capitalism at its finest; when corporate interests are threatened they come down on information exchange, which means they can disappear products. And since it's privately owned and not state owned, everyone's okay with it morally. Because cryptocurrency is naughty.
Let's ban drug discussion, too, it's naughty. How about hate speech, let's disappear search results for that. Who needs Big Brother when a massive surveillance apparatus that, quite frankly, is a headache to avoid (although I use duckduckgo and Firefox for all non tech stuff) can also disappear ideas and products without a popular vote or accountability?
One plus of all this is I won't have to see the Crypto Genius Reveals Next Bitcoin ad with the pic of the guy staring off in the distance in crooked glasses. Always hated that one.
As an aside, I'm not sure what drug discussion or hate speech has to do with this at all.
But he warned that there were wider implications for financial services, saying: “Big American tech companies are increasingly influential in deciding how financial services products are marketed. This is fine if they get to the right answer . . . but a worrying precedent if they do not, since the normal checks and balances do not apply to their decisions.”
("Google to ban cryptocurrency adverts", Financial Times, March 15, 2018)
I'm actually glad Google are (at least for the time being). Whilst rogue ICOs and crypto-pumpers are still working their stuff, the market is much more akin to back-street gambling and since there are already regs on AdWords for unsavoury ads, this fits the bill.
Also lots of russian money scam ads posted from temporary accounts, this may be explanation why ICOs aren't banned too: they ban, but new ads are posted again and again.
Please. People have always been gullible, it's just that the scams have moved to more lucrative enterprises.
Deleted Comment
It is a problem of basic finance education which should be part of the school curriculum. People also buy a lot of stuff they don't need or include false claims because a banner told them to.
Not sure SEC is a good example, since they are a corrupt organization focused on prohibiting class mobility. Their propaganda works better than ads on the same people.