Alex and PJ chase down the strangest scams from our Weird Ads tip line. At the bottom of the rabbit hole they find a Google employee who coached porn websites on how to be dirtier, a weed farm in the middle of Los Angeles, and a whole lot of sketchy locksmiths.



Futher Reading

David Segal’s story on locksmiths

The Ringfinders website

Form to give feedback on specific ads



Google’s statement on our episode: 

Our goal is to provide a great experience for the users, advertisers, and publishers that interact with our advertising products everyday. An important part of this work is listening to reactions—good, bad, and in-between—from our users about their experiences online. We appreciate this very much; it helps us make AdWords better. Bad ads are an industry-wide issue and we fight them with considerable fire-power: we’ve invested in best-in-class technology and built a global team of more than 1,000 googlers specifically dedicated to this effort. While this work has produced positive results—we disabled 780 million ads for violating our policies in 2015 alone—we understand this is an ongoing challenge for everyone and we’ll continue to battle it.