Search engine Bing has joined social media giants Google, Twitter, and Facebook in banning cryptocurrency advertising, citing the need to protect users from scams.

Bing made the announcement on its website May 14, saying it’s banning crypto ads because the virtual currency market is unregulated and therefore could enable the exploitation of unwitting consumers by con artists.

“Because cryptocurrency and related products are not regulated, we have found them to present a possible elevated risk to our users with the potential for bad actors to participate in predatory behaviors, or otherwise scam consumers,” Bing said. “To help protect our users from this risk, we have made the decision to disallow advertising for cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency related products, and unregulated binary options.”

Bing Joins Twitter, Facebook and Google

The new policy takes effect in June 2018, with enforcement slated for late-June to early-July. Bing now joins a growing chorus of social media platforms that have banned crypto advertising.

Twitter announced its ban in March 2018, as CCN.com has reported. Two weeks before that, search-engine monopoly Google blocked crypto and ICO ads, saying “we’ve seen enough consumer harm or potential for consumer harm that it’s an area that we want to approach with extreme caution.”

The Google decision followed a similar move by Facebook in January 2018. Bitcoin evangelists have responded by saying they plan to file a class-action lawsuit this summer.

Industry associations in South Korea, Russia, and China are planning to sue Google, Twitter, and Facebook, alleging there’s a “cartel collusion” among the three corporate juggernauts to manipulate the crypto market. They claim the ban has artificially deflated the prices of bitcoin and other virtual currencies.

Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg Embrace Crypto

Despite these anti-crypto corporate moves, Twitter billionaire Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg are bitcoin bulls based on their personal actions and statements, which are pro-crypto.

Dorsey predicts that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will ultimately displace all other currencies, probably within the next 10 years.

“The world ultimately will have a single currency, the Internet will have a single currency,” Dorsey said in March 2018. “I personally believe that it will be bitcoin.”

Similarly, Facebook has been in serious discussions to launch its own cryptocurrency as it continues to implement blockchain initiatives, as CCN.com previously reported.

“Facebook is specifically interested in creating its own digital token, which would allow its more than two billion users to facilitate transactions without government-backed currency,” according to a Cheddar report.

Zuckerberg also said that one of his top goals for 2018 is to study cryptocurrencies as part of a personal pledge.

“There are important counter-trends to this –like encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands,” Zuckerberg said. “I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.”

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