Because I keep seeing an ad for Polar Breeze, and Google ads are overwhelmingly grifts of some sort, I did a search for “polar breeze scam” and found https://malwaretips.com/blogs/polar-breeze-portable-ac-exposed-scam-or-legit-investigation/
@urlyman One ad I saw clearly picked up my location and stated made by engineers from Coupar Angus. Given it’s a tiny village with a chicken factory and a few shops, it seemed pretty unlikely! This seems to be the future of scam ads. The other one that cracks me up is some of the games I play keep advertising weight loss patches sold by “Boots”, I did read ASA knows about these ones too. So obviously fake and AI pictures of before and after.
…”The footage of Thomas Berger and Leo Garcia — the two supposed former NASA engineers shown collaborating on plans and discussing technical details — was pulled directly from Shutterstock.
A reverse image search on the clip confirms it.
There are no engineers named Thomas Berger and Leo Garcia. There is no NASA collaboration. There are no patents. The entire origin story was invented to give a $15 plastic fan the appearance of credibility.”
https://streetsofkante.com/qinux-breezamax-ac-is-a-scam-heres-the-hidden-secret/
…Thing is, the anti-scam articles, heavy with ads for LLMs, may in fact be AI generated 🤦♂️
…An intrinsically impersonal medium mediated by machine connection is tragically vulnerable.
Just like property prices will collapse long before sea level rise inundates cities, the “Can I trust this page?” waveform collapses long before everything is just slop
@urlyman Phil "A Different Bias" on YouTube warned against these too.
@martinvermeer yeah, I’m not about to buy one. I was just curious
@urlyman @martinvermeer
The question is, what liability, if any, does YouTube have for continuing to show ads it must know are a scam?
#enshittification
@KimSJ for the foreseeable future… roughly, none. It’s well into too big to fail or be held to account territory, especially when US governance is fully in on crypto corruption.
But Google is doing a pretty good job of enshittifying itself, hopefully to a point where it passes its own tipping point from *everyone uses Google* to *who tf in their right mind uses Google?*
