Once again, the Facebook ad team seems to be letting some, um, questionable ads through the approval process. Here’s one that I saw today. First, the ad itself – do you think this could be intended to confuse users as to whether this is a lead gen company or the government?
OK, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that the headline writer was just a bit over-zealous. Let’s move on to the landing page here:
So the URL is “CriminalJusticeDepartment.org.” Um, yeah, there’s definitely some misrepresentation going on here. Of course, not surprisingly, after filling out all of your personal information you get to the inevitable list of for-profit schools from which you can get criminal justice degrees (which is tangential at best to joining the CIA).
But lest we just conclude that this is simply false advertising to the nth degree, our friends at the CIA/Criminal Justice Department have one more surprise in store for us – that’s right, malware!
So let’s recap – representing themselves as both the CIA and the Criminal Justice Department *and* throwing some malware on users’ computers. Paging the Google Quality Score department – Facebook is now hiring!
Terry Whalen
August 16, 2010 at 8:16 am
heh, good one, nice find…
anamonous
August 19, 2010 at 9:35 am
I have seen this type of malware when you click on a web ad from piratebay, weatherbug, and mininova. not 100% sure on isohunt. Very hard to clean for an amatuer registry editor, even in safe mode. Once installed finally the anti-virus kicks in.
suggestion for a clean install:
1. do not enable drive restore in the control panel restore on all drives because it installs itself in the hidden restore.
2. I have done a windows install, formatting the drive.
or
do a ghost partition image backup to another drive. back all important data to another drive. faster partition image restore. wipes all relevant data in the windows drive.
anon
August 24, 2010 at 3:58 pm
It’s Vantage Media. A supposedly upstanding PPC management company…
davidzhawk
August 24, 2010 at 4:03 pm
That is shocking! I really assumed it was some Boca Raton fly-by-night!
Connor Bringas
August 27, 2010 at 11:29 am
Wow thats a terrible ad altogether. Im sure they got some leads from it though. I cant believe that horrible ad
AJ
September 13, 2010 at 3:00 pm
I’m glad I’m not the only one who was shocked by that ad. The fishy dot-org address pretty much tipped me off, but if that weren’t enough, the bullet holes and the Saleen sports coup done up as a cop car are nice hints lol
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about the malware, but this is really sad (that Facebook would sanction such a thing, I mean).
DragonSearch
September 29, 2010 at 6:58 am
A lot of ads on Facebook are misleading. Some of the actual landing pages have little to do with the ads that bring the user there. This is why Google will always be a better platform to advertise on – it is trust worthy.
Cassie
April 13, 2011 at 7:26 pm
That’s a mold-baekrer. Great thinking!
agoodmirror
December 13, 2010 at 5:38 am
I saw this ad and did a search on the url to see if anyone else had pointed out the obvious before making a post myself about it (lol)…but your post was the only one in three pages of returns which addressed the topic.
Additionally I didn’t even take the time to dig to the malware portion, just the concept itself that the CIA would farm operatives (or even analysts) off the net was ludicrous enough for me to be inspired to post…the malware is just gravy.
Rando
December 22, 2010 at 9:42 pm
Had exactly the same experience as agoodmirror and ended up here. They have now upgraded the ad to show a “SUPERMAXXEXXTREME!!!” action packed ass kicker:
Rando
December 22, 2010 at 9:43 pm
Whoops…forgot the link: http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/3482/65012419.jpg