Prohibited Commercial Practices

Policy Details
User Experiences
Data

Policy details

CHANGE LOG
Policy Rationale
We aim to protect users and businesses from being deceived out of their money, property, or personal information. To do so, we prohibit content and behavior that employ prohibited commercial practices. This includes false job or government program offers, celebrity and brand bait, investment schemes (including guaranteed returns), debt relief and credit repair schemes, get-rich-quick and giveaway schemes, romance schemes, and charity schemes.
We allow people to raise awareness of, educate others about, and condemn scams and other prohibited commercial practices, provided they do not reveal sensitive information or promote them.
For policies related to Prohibited Documents and Financial Services, see the Restricted Goods and Services Community Standards.
Our enforcement isn’t perfect, and we may not detect all policy violations. To learn more about how to spot deceptive content and what you can do to help protect yourself, visit our Scam Protection Center.
Enforcement
We may take a range of enforcement actions, including but not limited to removing content and ads, reducing distribution, restricting advertising accounts, limiting features, requiring verification, or disabling accounts. These actions may result from our own proactive detection, or be informed by reports from trusted entities and user feedback (described below).
User Feedback
User feedback helps us identify commercial practices that create poor user experiences. We consider signals such as consistent patterns or disproportionate volumes of negative feedback, and we share relevant feedback with advertisers and sellers so they can improve their content and customer satisfaction. Where negative feedback persists despite warnings, we may take the actions above, up to restricting or disabling the responsible accounts or entities. This includes taking enforcement on practices such as:
  • Misleading or unreasonable pricing.
  • Non-delivery: failure to deliver purchased products or services after payment has been made.
  • Product misrepresentation: promoting products or services that materially differ from what was advertised, including significant discrepancies in quality or incorrect items.
  • Unauthorized charges: charging a customer’s payment method without prior authorization or clear disclosure.
  • Violation of return or refund policies: failure to honor stated refund or return policies.
  • Deceptive subscription practices: enrolling customers in recurring payment plans or subscription services without clear disclosure of terms.
  • Links that appear to lead to legitimate commercial sites but instead lead to scam sites.
We do not allow:
Content that uses deceptive tactics to mislead people or businesses for commercial or financial gain, including but not limited to:
Prohibited Loan Content
This includes:
  • Loan offers requiring the user to pay an upfront fee to obtain a loan.
  • Loan offers that guarantee approval without any mention of standard approval criteria, such as financial information from the borrower.
Prohibited Gambling Content
This includes:
  • Offers of real money gambling services (“Real money” is real-world currency that can be used to buy goods or services in the real world, including national currencies such as U.S. Dollars and virtual currencies such as Bitcoin):
    • with a guarantee of winning.
    • implying or admitting to have rigged the outcome of a game or match
    • soliciting people to enable match fixing or looking for help or tips on how to fix a match or game
    • promoting gambling services in deceptive or obfuscated ways (such as unrelated text paired with a gambling promo image/video)
  • Offers that promote services from known deceptive gambling vendors.
Social casino games that simulate gambling with no opportunity to win real money are covered by our Community Standard for Restricted Goods and Services.
Prohibited Investment Content
This includes:
  • Offers of investment opportunities where returns on investment are guaranteed or risk-free.
  • Offers of investment opportunities where returns on investment or compensation is partly or fully based on recruitment of others to participate in the scheme.
  • Offers of investment opportunities claiming or referencing successful past performance or returns to create an expectation of similar future results.
  • Offers of investment opportunities that claim quick returns (such as under 24 hours).
  • Offers to turn a certain sum of money into a larger one through flipping or trick or strategy involving explicit mentions of “cash flip,” "money flip,” or similar terminology.
Prohibited Charity Content
This includes:
  • Fraudulent requests for money or donations for charitable causes.
Prohibited Romance Content
This includes:
  • Fraudulent attempts to establish online romantic relationships by seeking non-sexual companionship or relationship and offering or asking for money or its equivalent in exchange.
Prohibited Brand or Celebrity-Bait Content
This includes:
  • Brand-bait scams, which involve falsely claiming to represent, or speak in the voice of, an established business or entity, together with misleading tactics to bait people into engaging with the content in an attempt to scam or defraud.
  • Celebrity-bait scams, which involve falsely using the name, likeness, or imagery of a public figure, together with misleading tactics to bait people into engaging with the content in an attempt to scam or defraud.
Prohibited Get Rich Quick Content
This includes:
  • Offers of opportunities of unrealistic financial reward for unclear or minimal effort.
Prohibited Tangible, Spiritual or Illuminati Content
This includes:
  • Offers tangible rewards, such as money, goods, or services that have a monetary value including physical, digital and virtual currencies, and physical or digital goods and services for membership in or joining an association, cult, religious sect (for example, the Illuminati brotherhood).
  • Offers tangible rewards for using black magic or spells or magical items (for example, spells, lucky charms, amulets, tokens, potions, magic wallet, etc.).
Prohibited Insurance Content
This includes:
  • Offers of false, heavily discounted insurance with requests for an up-front fee, such as an administration fee or deposit.
  • Offers of false, heavily discounted insurance with promises of significant savings on insurance compared to conventional insurance providers.
Prohibited Job Content
This includes:
  • Offers of jobs containing no information about the employer and job specifications, simply referencing job vacancies.
  • Offers of work from home but the job title implies the employee cannot WFH.
  • Offers of jobs with advance promises of salary.
  • Offers of guaranteed jobs.
  • Offers of jobs with a demand for an advance fee before the job is granted.
Prohibited Debt Relief and Credit Repair Content
This includes:
  • Promises to eliminate or reduce debt by a particular amount in a set period of time.
  • Promises to stop all debt collections or lawsuits.
  • Promises to remove credit information from credit reports or create new "credit identity."
Prohibited Giveaway Content
This includes:
  • False offers of a guaranteed reward of real money or consumer goods (such as electronics, vehicles, or jewelry) without any action required by the user beyond sharing personal or financial information.
  • False offers of money from government grants or programs.
Prohibited Advance Fee Content
This includes:
  • Falsely promises money in exchange for an up-front fee/wire transfer/payment.
Notwithstanding the above, we do not prohibit content that condemns, raises awareness of, or educates others about scams or other prohibited commercial practices, without either revealing sensitive information or promoting them.
For the following Community Standards, we require additional information and/or context to enforce:
We may remove content that:
  • Involves frauds or scams that have been reported by a trusted entity.
  • Recruits people to participate in class action lawsuits using deceptive tactics, such as impersonating a government entity or news outlet, or using sensationalist or exaggerated claims.
  • Involves entities participating in or claiming to engage in organized fraud or scam behavior, including the use of multiple accounts on our services in concert to perpetrate fraudulent behaviors.
We allow content that is otherwise covered by this policy when posted in condemnation, educational, awareness raising, or news reporting contexts.