It’s been a few months already since Instagram started to basically bombard me with ads and other sponsored posts and accounts that specifically want to target a female audience – according to the information Instagram itself provides if you check it in the “Why you’re seeing this ad” option. The catch: I am not a female. I know. Spooky.
„I don’t have (any) veins in my body” – says the text in the bottom on the left picture.
And when you would think their ad “quality” could not sink any lower, then life will show you that it in fact could get even worse: when almost 99% of the ads they show you are now crypto or other scams.
A Spanglish personal blog with 15 followers would for sure have the need to post in Hungarian, a „health & wellness website” with 17 followers could totally be an expert in financial trading, and a „food & beverage” page with 0 followers could tell you everything about „Hungary’s best” casino noone ever heard about.
So a few months ago I started noticing that the overwhelming majority of the ads shown to me were actually targeted to women, so were totally irrelevant to me. Even though there’s an option for it it really makes no sense to indicate to Instagram that an ad is irrelevant. Why is that so? Because even though first I simply hid an ad and marked it as irrelevant, I was still bombarded with the same kind of ads – literally all the time.
CNN Business will most certainly publish an article in Hungarian. It’s totally possible that’s how they rolled back in October of 2022. On a totally different web address. Or maybe not.
It’s already a few years now when I got really fed up and started blocking all profiles I was shown an ad from or was shows to me as a suggested profile, or anything else like that. The problem is that there always will be more new profiles that run ads or are otherwise suggested so there’s no way really to block all of them unfortunately. And sometimes Instagram even disregards this and shows ads or suggestions from profiles you’ve already blocked, which is total madness.
Another issue is that while you can block an Instagram profile, there are advertisers who are not on Instagram, but still run ads there – and you cannot block these on Instagram at all.
The Hungarian word „egyensúly” is „balance” in English, and even though in English that could mean your account balance, you can also have balance in your life – and the scammers went with the latter meaning in Hungarian, so you can say your account balance will not have any vertigo!
50 points to Gryffindor for each seemingly…
50 points to Gryffindor, Gish, even though the scam post with your name is not very comedic.
…legitimate Facebook page…
50 points to Gryffindor, Plajia! But you will also lose 25 of those points because of the sanctions your post’s language went sideways – way over to the east of the Hungarian border to be exact.
…a scammer was able to use to post their scams.
100 points to Gryffindor, Dillon! It’s 50 points for your post – and an extra 50 points because it’s in Hungarian! You need to work on your ratings though.
And that’s where all these scam ads come into play. All of them have a usually very recently created fake Facebook page with literally zero or only a few dozen (probably also fake) followers, thereof having no real reputation – but still are allowed to run ads just because they pay for it.
How beautiful the irony is – scammers posing as good Samaritans to help you out if you got scammed!
And these are almost always the same: crypto investments, forex signals, fake games that basically do data harvesting, or other misleading apps – or just the usual cure-all wonder drugs you’ve never even heard of, but they can even help you regrow a brain!
Today we have a scientific legend with us, Erik Török – exclusive interview with the wonderman! Even though noone heard about his legendary feats, or maybe we can even call it his „feets”(sic!) as the scam ad itself is about a wonder ointment to cure fungal infection of the foot / toenail. But something smells for sure. (Would love to see an HUF/EUR/USD exchange rate of 4,9198 and 4,5132 as at the moment 1 HUF = 0.0026 EUR and 0.0029 USD…)
Or maybe not…
In Brazil they miraculously speak English! That’s probably one the benefits of this miraculous TEA (in all caps!) they want to sell! Anyone saying otherwise is probably lying… (…most likely in Brazilian Portuguese though.)
And that’s what “Mark Meta” really likes – to swallow the money these scammers pay to run their scam ads all the while removing these scams usually only when someone reports them, but not really before that.
It’s basically free money for them, they just have to take it – as there’s no way they would want to refund any scammer. And judging by the number of scam ads, they must earn an amount incomprehensible for most people.
Every time a „special report” tells about something totally shocking, it’s always questionable, if it comes in a language different from the actual profile it posted, especially if it’s combined with a celebrity or an otherwise famous person seemingly endorsing something.
The latest update to their app introduced an even more alarming issue, which may simply be a bug, but it’s really problematic regardless: now when you report or hide an ad, it will still stay there, will not be hidden. Previously these would at least immediately disappear from your feed. But not anymore.
But wait, there’s a silver lining! (Is there though…?) It will only be a few more weeks and we will finally receive the totally justifiable version 300.0 of the app! Who needs semantic versioning anyway, right?
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