The slippery nature of online advertising gets better (or worse) all the time. The latest comes from Confiant’s CTO, Jerome Dangu. Turns out there’s a fake agency holdco of sorts, with 28 fake ad agencies under the Zirconium umbrella.

They were responsible for some, but definitely not all, of the redirect malvertising seen in 2017. If you read Mr. Dangu’s article, you’ll see that the “agency” websites improved in quality through the year. However, when I went to one of the fake agency websites, it was instantly obvious that it was bogus.

My questions of the ad exchanges and ad tech in general: Who’s checking things over there? Even a monkey could tell that these “agencies” were fake and should be kept away.

Does anybody have pride in their workmanship any more?