“The ads are fake, and they are not going to work for advertisers because we know that they are fake,” Aditi Kulkarni, founder and CEO of The Real Ad, told The Hindu.
She is referring to ads that are paid for by advertisers that are in a rush to get more clicks and shares, rather than for the ads themselves.
“The ads that we see are not real, they are very cheap and they have been created by the same people,” she said.
The ads have been targeting people on social media and the likes of Google’s AdSense, but they are also being distributed on the black market.
“The ad agencies are using this scam to monetise their work and make a lot of money from this,” she added.
While she said that some of the ads are from the likes.google, another group of ads are sponsored by other ad agencies, she also added that some were from legitimate companies.
“There are fake companies out there that are doing legitimate ads.
They are doing ads that don’t work.
It’s very easy to spot these fake ads,” she told The Hindustan Times.
In a separate investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NACB), it was found that a group of advertisers was trying to buy ads on websites for free from a few advertising networks.
The ads were posted on several online platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
The NACB is probing the case.
While there are ads on Facebook and YouTube that are fake or misleading, Aditi also said that it was difficult to detect fake accounts on the social media platforms, because the users were not following the companies’ terms of use and guidelines.