Bing has joined other tech giants Google, Twitter and Facebook to ban cryptocurrency advertisements. The company says cryptocurrencies are unregulated and present an elevated risk to its users.
The ban on cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency related advertisement takes effect in June but its enforcement will be gradually rolled out late June and early July, according to a statement about the policy change.
”Because cryptocurrency and related products are not regulated, we have found them to present a possible elevated risk to our users…
To help protect our users from this risk, we have made the decision to disallow advertising for cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency related products, and un-regulated binary options.”
Facebook became the first major tech company to ban cryptocurrency ads in January. The social media giant said that cryptocurrencies were “frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.”
The move had come at the height of the scramble for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with several scams coming up to take advantage of the craze.
Bitcoin took a direct hit when the ban by Facebook was announced dropping about 12 per cent.
Following in the Steps of Google and Twitter
Twitter followed suit announcing its ban in March. Google’s ban on cryptocurrency content also goes into effect in June. Google’s Scott Spencer said the company was foreseeing potential “consumer harm” when he made the announcement.
More recently, the company has also banned all extensions containing cryptomining software citing abuse.
This came as it emerged that attackers were now deploying malicious cryptomining software more than ever before. A report by Symantec shows that cryptojacking – the use of one’s computer resources without their knowledge to mine digital currencies – had gone up a massive 8500% in the last one year.
The bans came amid concurrent crackdowns by governments around the world fearing the rise of the industry and the ease with which it can enable money laundering.
Advertisers have however found clever ways to circumvent the bans by for example misspelling words like bitcoin or ethereum.