Newsweek, in its current incarnation a frantic ALL-CAPS clickbait site, and the CFPB, Elizabeth Warren's version of the Clinton Foundation, except inside the Federal government, have been having a rough year. Newsweek will run anything. It even ran a clickbait article claiming that Hillary Clinton could still become president (only if every other human being on earth dies first) and then had its servers carted away in a mysterious raid. And when we last heard from the CFPB, a secret faction within it calling itself, Dumbledore's Army had pledged to resist President Trump while sipping hot cocoa in their pajamas.
But meanwhile some more serious shenanigans were going on.
The publisher of Newsweek and the International Business Times has been engaging in fraudulent online traffic practices that helped it secure a major ad buy from a US government agency, according to a new report released today by independent ad fraud researchers.
IBTimes.com, the publisher’s US business site, last year won a significant portion of a large video and display advertising campaign for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency. Social Puncher, a consulting firm that investigates online ad fraud, alleges in its report that the ads were displayed to an audience on IBTimes.com that includes a significant amount of “cheap junk traffic with a share of bots.”
But the bots still had better reading comprehension than the average Newsweek reader.
The CFPB’s ad budget was the subject of criticism from Republican lawmakers after the Daily Caller reported last year that it had awarded more than $40 million in contracts to a single ad agency, GMMB, which is one of the top Democratic media strategists. (A portion of money in those contracts was used to pay media outlets for advertising space, and was not kept by GMMB.)
Isn't this what the government is for, so that lefties can pay lefties with taxpayer money? Georgetown demesnes don't buy themselves. Neither do yachting memberships in John Kerry's yacht club.
But the CFPB had awarded a huge contract to a lefty ad agency which then bought ads on a site where the traffic consisted of bots and progressives. But best of all, this was being perpetrated by an agency whose mission is to protect consumers from abuses by companies.
Like the companies the CFPB was paying to rip off taxpayers.
The CFPB was created in 2011 as a result of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. President Trump recently tweeted that the bureau “has been a total disaster,” and installed his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, as its new director.
I can't imagine why he would think that.
On Monday, BuzzFeed News reported that NMG’s top editor, Dayan Candappa, was hired there after being fired from Reuters over allegations of sexual harassment. As a result of the story, Newsweek Media Group placed Candappa on leave pending an investigation.
This follows an October report from BuzzFeed News that revealed local content for IBT Australia is produced by writers in the Philippines, and its offices in Sydney were occupied by people who say they do not work for the company.
Two weeks ago, investigators from the Manhattan District Attorney's office raided Newsweek’s New York offices and hauled off computer servers as part of an ongoing investigation. Subsequent reporting from the company's own journalists found that the IRS filed $2 million worth of tax liens against NMG’s cofounders. Multiple Newsweek freelancers also told BuzzFeed News they have to wait months to get paid.
This all comes on the heels of layoffs in 2016 and ongoing questions about why the company has funneled millions of dollars to a university founded by a controversial Korean cleric with ties to NMG’s founders and executives.
If only there was some sort of government agency to investigate abusive practices by companies that are ripping off the government.
Beginning in early 2017, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau spent millions on digital display and video ads that aimed to educate consumers about their rights when it comes to college tuition and home loans.
The CFPB was created with the dual mandate of educating consumers about their rights with regard to the financial industry, as well as to hold the industry accountable via investigations and other action. Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren was instrumental in its creation.
Data from SimilarWeb show that IBTimes.com began purchasing traffic from pop-up and pop-under windows as early as the fall of 2016. Social Puncher found that as the site’s organic search traffic declined, it replaced the audience with purchased traffic.
So the CFPB was paying for traffic that consisted of people trying to close their pop up windows after they had been deceptively redirected there so that the CFPB could sign some big checks to its lefty allies.
The left loves creating their little watchdogs. But who watches the consumer fraud watchdog when it's funding consumer fraud?