Have you ever been on the receiving end of an attempted tech support scam? Most of us have, even if it"s just an advertisement in search results that we don"t dare click on. Microsoft aims to change all of that.
The firm made the following revision to the Bing Ads User Safety Policy:
Bing Ads disallows the promotion of third party online technical support services to consumers because of serious quality issues that can impact end user safety.
This is clearly a move to block scammers from making victims of Bing users, but any and all third party tech support ads will be blocked, including legitimate ones. Obviously, it would be tough to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate technical support, so this was the only possible option.
If you"re not at all familiar with these scammers, it generally involves getting you to give them permission to remotely access your computer. They make up a problem that might affecting your PC (and they might even inject malware into it) and then charge you to fix it.
Advertisers are cracking down on scams across the board. Just yesterday, Google announced that as of July 29, it would no longer accept ads for payday loans in AdWords.
Source: Bing Ads via Ars Technica