FPL is funded by advertising but because of how internet advertising works we have little control over the ads that appear. Sadly, some FPLers have been caught out by some of the dodgier ones but hopefully that is a thing of the past with our new “Report this ad” feature. But we need your help.

Update: If an ad is just irrelevant, repetitive or annoying but NOT deceptive then you can “stop seeing this ad” by clicking he ‘X’ or triangular symbol on the top right. Please don’t report these 🙂

You know the ones: “How to lose belly fat”, “Congratulations! You’ve won [insert Apple product]”, “1 new message”, etc. etc. Sometimes the ads try to look as if they are part of the webpage to fool you into clicking them, for example mimicking a menu bar for a mobile app. Some have even managed to charge users for £4.50 through their mobile networks for receiving junk text messages.

Annoyingly, when someone is caught out like this FPL also suffers because it puts people off coming back, and damages our reputation. Even worse, I’ve got no way of finding the offending ads since at any one time there are hundreds of thousands of them that may or may not appear, and all I have to go on is the description offered (or not) by the angry complainant.

To help tackle the problem I’ve introduced a link beneath all of the ads saying “Report this ad” so that you can report the ads when you see them. The problem is that the kind of user who is sucked in by these ads is probably not the kind of person who would recognise them and report them, so if we have any chance of stopping these rogue advertisers from getting away with it we’ll need everyone to keep an eye out and report anything that looks dodgy.

I’m very much hoping that this will finally be the end of “Free Beauty Samples”, or the “Amazing Wrinkle Trick”.

Thanks in advance!

Chris 🙂