… The striking thing is that the BBC investigation tracked a specific type of TOS-violating ad targeting ESTA, the United States’ electronic system for travel authorization. This choice of subject was rooted in the initial scandal—advertisers charging exorbitant fees for free or cheap government services—but remains useful because it shows Google is not simply overwhelmed by vague fakery in the ocean of online commerce. It’s matching specific searches to specific advertisements. Why can’t Google flag such specific, unambiguous search terms?
The implication is that it can. A straightforward word filter can spot ESTA-related ads and searches. What it can’t do, though, is tell if the ad served is a swindle, TOS-violating, or illegal. And it turns out that machine learning can’t tell either, after a few years of trying. This means humans would have to check the flagged ads. But this will not happen, because it’s expensive.
Google doesn’t make significant money from visa fee swindle ads, but it makes a lot of money by avoiding human moderation.