Google has been using AI to crack down on advertising fraud, meeting a key demand from banks and politicians to bear down on scam accounts.
The search giant says it suspended 39.2 million advertiser accounts in the US alone in 2024 — more than triple the number from the previous year.
Overall, the company removed almost half a billion ads related to scams.
Last year, Google launched over 50 upgrades to its Large Language Models, specifically targetted at rooting out bad actors.
"These updates sped up complex investigations, helping us identify bad actors and fraud signals — like illegitimate payment information — during account setup," states the firm. "This kept billions of policy-violating ads from ever showing to a consumer, while ensuring legitimate businesses can show ads to customers faster."
The company says it also adapted its defenses against evolving scams that use deep fake AI-generated public figure impersonation ads.
Scams impersonating businesses and government officials cost Americans $2.95 billion last year, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
"To fight back, we assembled a team of over 100 experts to develop countermeasures, such as updating our Misrepresentation policy to suspend advertisers that promote these scams," the company says. "As a result, we were able to permanently suspend more than 700,000 offending advertiser accounts. This led to a 90% drop in reports of this kind of scam ad last year."
While the figures are impressive, Google and other Big Tech firms like Meta remain the primary source of scam accounts on the Internet - leading to repeatd calls from financial institutions and fintechs for social media companies to share reimbursement for victims of scams originating on their platforms.