The Trump Admin Didn’t Want to Protect Consumers—And Neither Does Ad Tech

Barry Green has seen how the sausage gets made in digital advertising, and let’s just say, it’s more rat meat than filet mignon. A veteran of ad tech’s inner circles, he’s sat at the tables where people pretend fraud is a fixable nuisance rather than a multi-billion-dollar business model. He’s even walked through a mobile phone fraud warehouse in Ukraine, run by the mafia, where they proudly bragged about stealing millions.

And yet, no one in the industry actually wants to stop it.

“The whole system is broken,” Green says, “and it needs to be taken apart and rebuilt.”

He’s not talking about a minor patch job. This isn’t a “few bad apples” situation. The entire ad tech supply chain is built to make fraud profitable—for everyone except the brands actually paying for ads.

Fraud Detection: The Industry’s Favorite Magic Trick

If you’re imagining a sophisticated network of anti-fraud tools standing guard against the bad guys, you’re adorable. Fraud detection in ad tech isn’t a battle—it’s a racket.

"The fault lies with the antifraud tools who have no standards," Green points out. One product flags a batch of traffic as invalid, while another tool looks at the exact same traffic and gives it a clean bill of health. The agencies? They go with whichever vendor they’re already paying for, because why question the system when the system pays you?

And even if you do question it, good luck fighting the black box of Google. Green has been there. He’s watched advertisers try to argue their case, only to hit a wall of silence. The only response they get? More invoices.

Most agencies don’t even pretend to care. They just assume fraud is part of the cost of doing business, baking it into their bids like a service fee at a shady airport restaurant. “Most agencies believe the cost of invalid traffic is already built into their bids,” Green explains. Translation? They know they’re being scammed, they just don’t care.

Anti-Fraud Companies Are Winning—By Losing

Here’s the fun part: fraud detection companies don’t actually want to find all the fraud.

“The brand safety and anti-fraud tools are not close to accurate,” Green says, “and it’s to their benefit not to find all bots, illegal sites, MFA sites, etc.”

That’s right. If they actually stopped fraud, they’d be out of business. Instead, they catch just enough of it to justify their existence while letting billions slip through the cracks.

And the tools they’re using? Held together with duct tape and prayers. “They are using legacy systems built years ago and then hacked for new threats,” Green points out. “But I highly doubt they pick up everything in the real.”

Meanwhile, the actual criminals are hiring world-class engineers to stay ahead of the game.

“The engineers for the bad guys are highly paid,” Green says. “I believe they can outsmart any of the anti-fraud products.”

Which makes sense. The fraudsters have unlimited funds—because no one is stopping them from stealing billions of dollars.

No One’s Going to Jail—And That’s the Whole Point

If this were any other industry, there would be perp walks. People would be arrested. Executives would be dragged before Congress. But in ad tech? Nothing.

Green has been in the rooms where the government could have actually done something. He sat at a White House meeting with the deputy head of the FTC during the Trump administration. When the topic of regulation came up, her response was blunt:

“This administration is not in favor of regulations. We support NO regulations.”

And that was that. No follow-up. No task force. No one in power had any interest in stopping billions of dollars in fraud.

So it continues. Billions get stolen, and everyone in the supply chain stays quiet until they get caught.

“No one goes to jail,” Green says, “and everyone in the supply chain is complicit.”

The Bottom Line? Nobody Actually Wants to Fix This

Stopping fraud would mean admitting how deep the rot goes. It would mean acknowledging that Google, Meta, agencies, and ad tech vendors are all complicit. It would mean regulators actually doing their jobs.

Instead, the industry does what it does best:

• Pretend the problem is under control

• Publish a white paper

• Hold a panel at Cannes

• Keep letting billions flow to criminals

Because fraud isn’t a bug in the system. It is the system.