This is literally what bonding and insurance is for.

It doesn't matter. As long as Google is not held accountable for showing you a scam ad that makes you lose $10k, Google doesn't care about the trustworthiness of the spammer.

They just care whether the check clears.

Which means that if the ad companies have consequences for letting through scams, new identities will face restrictions (e.g. identity verification, initial safety deposit, not being able to advertise on most surfaces) until they find a way to keep the scams out or die trying.

Of course, this will cost money, both because it will cost them legitimate customers that get caught up in the friction and because implementing the measures/reviews has costs, so they will only do it if forced. If they can just externalize the cost (in the form of scam victims getting hurt by scams) and/or can profit from the scams without sufficient downsides, they're going to do just that...

Back in 2013, I worked at a top-100 traffic website where we ran a few ads through Google. We'd regularly have blantant scams being advertised, and we'd report them, block the advertiser, and the next day they'd be back with bit for bit identical images under a new advertiser profile. Even back then, our Google reps were basically like "we can't do anything about it", which is clear bullshit, they just wouldn't and still won't as it might cut into their profits, and their recommendation was that we put a human on staff to review ads run on our platform daily and continue to ban the problematic ones.

Google and all the tech companies need to be held to account for this shit. Facebook in 2024 estimated as much as 10% of their revenue, $16 billion, would come from scams and ads that should be banned on their platform, and everyone suffers for it. I call bullshit on the notion that they can't afford to do better because scale. Spend some of those billions of dollars on human review. Spend some of those billions of dollars remunerating the people who get scammed through your platform. If you can't afford to keep running your advertising business after that, then it gets shut down, there's no inherent right to the monopoly on advertising that Google has had for over a decade.

Stop making excuses for companies worth trillions of dollars.

Not just Google. Add X or Pinterest as well. These scammers’ ads have similar patterns… You can report them ad nauseam and nothing changes.

> resetting their trustworthiness score

But this is not how actual FICO scores work, and more interestingly, also not how historically Google has assigned domain authority for PageRank.

In both cases a history of transactions is required. Even if you could just spin up a new ID for a FICO score, having zero or little credit history typically means you'll have a very hard time securing any meaningful loans. Likewise, in the days when PageRank mattered a new domain would typically take a year to build up the authority required to get good results ranking well. Of course there were work around, but there are plenty of examples where easy to create a new identity does not equate starting with a fresh reputation (in fact even HN has the same principle! New accounts cannot, for example, downvote)