The advert caught Gordon Turner’s eye instantly. It was an official-looking on-line video encouraging viewers to use for the “Senior Booster Program,” which entitled these 65 and older to government-issued funds of $1,728. For Turner, a 77-year-old Texan on incapacity advantages who lives alone and financially helps his aged mom, that sort of money might go a great distance. So he clicked the advert’s hyperlink instantly to enter his private data, and he waited.
Sadly for Turner — and the greater than 10 million others who’ve seen this video — no such program exists, and no verify will likely be coming within the mail. Behind the Google advert, and lots of of others prefer it, is 1111 LLC, a little-known online marketing firm run by a former professional MMA fighter from the Canadian prairies. The agency, which additionally operates a community of pro-Trump information websites and MAGA merch e-shops, has quietly erupted into one in all Google’s top-performing and highest-spending political advertisers.
1111 LLC has pumped out a deluge of slickly produced movies through Google advertisements in latest months that promote solely fabricated authorities handouts: $38,070 in tuition funding for people with out school levels by the “Authorities Schooling Program”; $2,888 for seniors in “sure zip codes” by the “ACA Plus Program”; $97,246 for owners by the “House owner Reduction” program; $710 for drivers with out DUIs by the “SODA Program”; amongst others.
Many of those advertisements are designed to seem like information segments, with miscontextualized footage of President Joe Biden at his desk showing to signal paperwork associated to the bogus payouts. Some advertisements even show falsified CNBC articles with headlines restating the advertisements’ hoaxes. They’ve collectively been seen effectively over 100 million instances in a matter of months, in response to public Google information, sparking false hope in an untold variety of households nationwide because the coronavirus pandemic drags into its third calendar yr.
“I actually believed it. This one was convincing,” Turner mentioned of the “Senior Booster Program.” Since giving out his contact data by the advert’s hyperlink, he mentioned, the one factor he has gotten is a barrage of calls and emails from spammers attempting to cheat him out of his cash.
1111 LLC’s advertisements are a part of a sprawling scheme to drive net visitors and harvest folks’s private particulars, together with their cellphone numbers and emails, which can be despatched on to the advertising agency’s shoppers to do with as they please (like financially prey on the aged), or could also be rented out and bought as data lists for giant cash.
Shady firms fleecing folks on-line is a narrative as previous because the web, however what’s noteworthy on this ruse is Google’s complicity. The tech behemoth has pocketed greater than $2.2 million from 1111 LLC since September to run advertisements that cruelly con its personal customers whereas flagrantly violating its personal insurance policies — and, specialists say, federal regulation.
Google advert spend information for 1111 LLC
Over the previous 5 months, when 1111 LLC all of a sudden began outspending lots of Google’s most prolific political advertisers — together with Donald Trump’s Save America PAC — not a single one in all its advertisements was audited and brought down. It wasn’t till Tuesday, after HuffPost had reached out to inquire about 1111 LLC, that Google lastly pulled the advertisements.
Over a sequence of exchanges, a Google spokesperson pointedly declined to reply if 1111 LLC could be allowed to buy advertisements once more sooner or later.
“It’s simply mind-blowing that on a platform like Google — which portrays itself as having gone above and past with advert transparency — you possibly can pop up out of nowhere and run tens of millions of {dollars} of blatant rip-off advertisements with out elevating any purple flags,” mentioned Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of the nonprofit Accountable Tech.
“It doesn’t encourage loads of confidence as we head towards one other election season,” Lehrich added. “If one thing this brazen can in some way go unnoticed, what’s stopping somebody from [running ads] pushing focused disinformation to suppress votes in swing states?”
‘A Killing To Be Made’
1111 LLC is registered to Chad Hamzeh, a Calgary, Alberta, native and former professional MMA fighter who now lives in San Diego, in response to public data. In media interviews and podcasts, Hamzeh has described how in 2008 he and his spouse moved to Thailand, the place he kickboxed full-time and taught himself online marketing on the aspect. After returning dwelling a yr later with a child on the way in which and $20,000 in debt, he mentioned, he determined to pursue promoting as a profession and managed to get himself again within the black with a single advert marketing campaign that netted $45,000 in revenue in below two months.
From there, Hamzeh shortly turned considerably of a legend within the area, with one on-line publication declaring him the “most straight ahead authority on the internet in the case of paid visitors” who “has made it brutally obvious that there’s a killing to be made in paid visitors if you realize what you’re doing.”
DSV2 Media, a advertising firm Hamzeh based in 2009, has a ready listing of shoppers and “manages a median of $500,000+ month-to-month in marketing campaign visitors with a robust ROI,” in response to an internet site that interviewed him in 2020. (An unverified job board itemizing means that DSV2 Media has merely rebranded as 1111 LLC.)
Since leaving his preventing profession behind, Hamzeh has launched and helped lead a string of scattered companies promoting every kind of issues, from digital advertising coaching books to dietary dietary supplements and automotive shining merchandise. Amongst them was Revive You Media LLC, also called 1806369 Alberta Restricted, which final yr pleaded responsible to partaking in misleading advertising practices and was fined $15 million following an investigation by the Canadian Competitors Bureau. As CEO of that firm, Hamzeh was personally banned below Alberta’s Shopper Safety Act from collaborating in “‘deceptive and deceiving’ promoting for any and all merchandise bought and marketed.”
“Typically, the harvesting of information is simply step one in a scheme to half customers with their hard-earned money.”
– Bonnie Patten, govt director of Reality in Promoting
Remarkably, the MMA fighter-turned-international grifter has to date managed to keep away from public scrutiny. Press protection of Hamzeh consists solely of glowing profiles and interviews about his success as an entrepreneur. He has finished a powerful job of distancing his title from his extra shadowy enterprise ventures, together with 1111 LLC, which has no web site, no social media pages and basically no digital footprint — regardless of its hefty advert buys. (In interviews about DSV2 Media, Hamzeh has acknowledged that the majority of his shoppers desire to stay nameless, and that “you gained’t see us actually advertising our company.”)
Hamzeh didn’t reply to HuffPost’s cellphone calls or to an inventory of questions despatched to his e-mail and LinkedIn account.
As he effectively is aware of, paid visitors and information harvesting might be extraordinarily profitable, as evidenced by his agency’s multimillion-dollar funding in Google advertisements designed to just do that. When folks like Turner give up their cellphone numbers, emails and different private data by 1111 LLC’s advert hyperlinks in hopes of receiving authorities handouts, it seems that their information is shipped to a wide range of totally different web sites, which then spam them and attempt to rip them off. Turner estimates that he now receives as many as seven spam calls per day, and that his e-mail is so inundated with predatory solicitations that he not checks his inbox.
“Typically, the harvesting of information is simply step one in a scheme to half customers with their hard-earned money — and really successfully,” mentioned Bonnie Patten, govt director of the nonprofit Reality in Promoting. “Particularly now, with an elevated desperation due to the pandemic, I believe these sorts of campaigns are literally simpler than ever.”
In 2021, in a LinkedIn job itemizing for 1111 LLC, Hamzeh wrote that “final yr alone we despatched out over 1.2 Billion e-mails, all [business-to-consumer], to our e-mail database on the time of over 1 million subscribers.”
Hamzeh didn’t reply to questions on whether or not 1111 LLC harvests folks’s data on behalf of its shoppers, for his or her use solely, or whether it is straight promoting this information to exterior consumers, reminiscent of political campaigns, or each. This follow, often called listing constructing, has performed a considerable however under-acknowledged position within the unfold of on-line disinformation, pushed by entrepreneurs utilizing clickbait falsehoods to lure folks into handing over their private particulars. The return on funding from listing constructing might be big, particularly within the political house; an inventory of emails can go for tens of millions of {dollars}.
No matter how 1111 LLC is earning profits, what it’s doing is sort of actually unlawful, mentioned Patten. The Federal Commerce Fee Act outlaws “unfair or misleading acts or practices in or affecting commerce,” with “misleading” outlined as “more likely to mislead the patron appearing moderately within the circumstances, to the patron’s detriment.”
In less complicated phrases, industrial advertisers aren’t allowed to misinform customers.
So, why did 1111 LLC determine to do it anyway? There are a few possible explanations. First, the probabilities of getting caught have been very low. Not like tv and radio advertisements, for instance, digital advertisements on platforms reminiscent of Google might be selectively micro-targeted and are due to this fact much less more likely to be a focus for promoting watchdogs. Moreover, within the case of 1111 LLC’s video advertisements selling pretend authorities handouts, customers might not even notice they’ve been duped, in order that they’re much less more likely to report the advertisements to state attorneys normal or federal companies.
Second, even when the FTC have been to analyze 1111 LLC’s promoting practices, the ensuing penalty — if something — would in all probability be not more than a slap on the wrist. With the duty of monitoring advertising throughout the complete U.S. financial system, the FTC merely doesn’t have the bandwidth to go after each rip-off, Patten famous, including that the FTC Act, which is the fee’s major statute, doesn’t even allow it to fantastic an organization for misleading promoting normally. As an alternative, 1111 LLC would probably be issued a stop and desist warning.
The FTC declined to remark straight on 1111 LLC’s advertisements. A spokesperson mentioned the company is dedicated to defending not solely folks’s cash however their data as effectively.
“The low threat of getting caught is only a price of doing enterprise that [1111 LLC] isn’t involved about,” Patten suspects, as a result of “they’re in all probability making a lot cash on the info they’re accumulating.”
Large Earnings For Google
The overwhelming majority of Google’s income comes from its advertisements, which introduced in additional than $200 billion for the primary time final yr — greater than some other firm on the planet — up from $147 billion in 2020. Regardless of widespread concern that the corporate has prioritized progress and income over folks, leaving its customers weak to the malicious exercise thriving in its blind spots, Google has maintained that it has its advert juggernaut below management.
“We wish folks to belief the advertisements they see on our platform and we’ve strict insurance policies that prohibit clickbait advertisements designed to drive visitors to websites or advertisements that mislead customers concerning the service being supplied,” a Google spokesperson instructed HuffPost. “We’re additionally continuously working to enhance our enforcement methods to catch and stop abuse.”
Google makes use of a mix of automated methods and human evaluation to implement its advert insurance policies, which led to the blocking or removing of greater than 101 million advertisements below Google’s misrepresentation coverage final yr, the spokesperson mentioned. He didn’t reply questions on how 1111 LLC’s lots of of plainly dishonest advertisements slipped by the cracks and managed to go unnoticed for months whereas accumulating tens of tens of millions of views.
“We’ve reviewed the advertisements in query and have taken acceptable motion in opposition to those who violate our insurance policies,” the spokesperson mentioned.
Despite the fact that it has facilitated and profited off a large, overtly predatory monetary scheme that specialists imagine is prohibited, Google faces no legal responsibility for working 1111 LLC’s advertisements.
“We wish folks to belief the advertisements they see on our platform.”
– A Google spokesperson
Google and different on-line intermediaries are shielded from obligation for user-generated content material, together with advertisements, by Part 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Critics argue that the 1996 regulation has led many of those platforms to take a lax method to vetting and moderating the advertisements they host, on the expense of their customers. In flip, this has fostered a strong sense of impunity amongst scammers, whose enterprise fashions depend on the platforms’ unwillingness or lack of ability to implement their very own insurance policies.
1111 LLC has additionally marketed on Meta’s Fb and Instagram, although at a a lot smaller scale than its Google advertisements operation. It has spent greater than $20,000 to run advertisements by a pro-Trump Fb web page with not even 1,000 “likes” known as American Reality, for which it’s listed because the proprietor. American Reality owns a community of different right-wing web sites, in response to its “About” part, together with ConservativeSociety.org, American Merch Mall, Freedom Store 2024 and the American Reality Publication. These entities publish “Actual Information For Actual Patriots” and promote anti-Biden merchandise, which 1111 LLC promotes by its American Reality advertisements.
Like their Google counterparts, the 1111 LLC-sponsored Fb advertisements additionally deceive customers. One advert, advertising a “free” hat with the textual content “Let’s Go Brandon,” results in the web site for American Merch Mall, which prominently options made-up product endorsements from The Hill, Newsmax and Navy.com.
On the acquisition web page is a pre-checked field to purchase 10 hats for $4.95 every. One other advert, selling the identical hat, results in the Freedom Store 2024 web site, which shows the identical phony endorsements and offers consumers three choices for his or her “free” merchandise: one hat for $19.95; two hats for $29.95; or a hat, a flag and 4 stickers for $39.95.
Meta prohibits advertisements that comprise “misleading, false, or deceptive claims.” Thus far, although, days after being reached for remark by HuffPost, it has but to take motion in opposition to any of 1111 LLC’s American Reality advertisements, in response to publicly accessible Fb and Instagram information. A spokesperson mentioned the corporate is “trying into” the advertisements.
A Lack Of Accountability
Within the U.Ok., lawmakers are pushing for tech platforms that carry rip-off advertisements to bear monetary duty and to reimburse victims.
“On-line platforms are internet hosting these items, probably not placing sufficient effort into weeding it out, and certainly financially benefiting as a result of they’re getting the promoting revenues,” MP Mel Stride, chairman of the cross-party Treasury Committee, instructed Reuters earlier this month. “The federal government ought to have a look at some sort of association that makes the polluter pay.”
Within the U.S., with none strong framework for platform accountability on this house, Large Tech advert networks will stay a haven for unhealthy actors, mentioned Lehrich, who known as Google and Fb “a large reward to scammers.”
Each firms have repeatedly and vehemently defended their commitments to transparency in promoting. They typically cite as proof the existence of their advert libraries, which publicly catalog sure advertisements together with restricted insights into spending, focusing on and viewership information.
“It’s simply mind-blowing that … you possibly can pop up out of nowhere and run tens of millions of {dollars} of blatant rip-off advertisements with out elevating any purple flags.”
– Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of Accountable Tech
However, because the 1111 LLC case illustrates, this doesn’t absolutely treatment the dearth of accountability for advert content material. Advertisers are nonetheless granted appreciable anonymity; Hamzeh’s title, for instance, isn’t listed by both platform alongside 1111 LLC’s advertisements. It’s straightforward to see how advertisers can cover behind pop-up firms with obscure and generally used names, like “1111 LLC,” to run dangerous advertisements that may not ever be traced again to them.
With the platforms themselves protected by Part 230, and advertisers free to pay for content material promotion from the shadows, there’s typically nobody to be held chargeable for potential injury brought on by their advertisements. And the injury might be extraordinary.
Forward of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia’s Web Analysis Company paid to make use of focused social media advertisements to sow partisan division, very efficiently, which is what in the end led to the creation of Meta and Google’s advert libraries in response to stress from Congress. The bipartisan Sincere Advertisements Act, launched in 2017, would have additional elevated transparency disclosure necessities for on-line political advertisements, however it stalled within the Senate.
Since then, purveyors of election-related falsehoods have solely turn into extra refined, as have the ad-targeting skills they’re afforded by on-line advert platforms.
With that in thoughts, Lehrich warned, 1111 LLC’s capacity to overtly leverage Google advertisements for effectively past 100 million views of its outrageous disinformation, with out elevating the slightest suspicion, is trigger for severe concern — not only for customers, however for democracy.