Bing Ads released its report on actions it took to keep malicious and misleading ads and advertisers off the search results in 2016. Its systems rejected 130 million ads (fewer than the 250 million were rejected in 2015) and banned 175,000 advertisers (more than the 150,000 banned the prior year).

Phishing ads, ads promoting tech support scams and counterfiet goods continued to be areas in which Bing continued to battle bad actors. More than 7,000 sites were blocked for potential phishing attacks, and a million ads were blocked for hocking counterfeit items. Bing Ads banned third-party tech support advertisers altogether last year after finding it difficult to weed out the good from the bad. Its systems blocked more than 17 million tech support scam ads in 2016.

Bing added a software download policy for ads and says it “ramped up systems that detect browser hijacking ads, phishing attempts, scareware ads, ads targeting the most common sites on the internet, and ads with multimedia content” in 2016. Bing relies primarily on machine learning to find bad actors, but does perform “occasional” manual checks as well.

