{"id":293795,"date":"2026-02-12T07:40:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T07:40:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/293795\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T07:40:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T07:40:12","slug":"david-mcwilliams-on-how-social-media-giants-are-making-billions-from-fake-ads-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/293795\/","title":{"rendered":"David McWilliams on how social media giants are making billions from fake ads \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph free \">First up on this week\u2019s episode of Inside Business, we look at new research this week from Revolut suggests that social media companies made \u20ac32 million in revenue from scam ads to Irish users in 2025. The figure for Europe as a whole was a whopping \u20ac4.4 billion. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph free \">Host Ciar\u00e1n Hancock is joined by Irish Times reporter Hugh Dooley to takes us through the headline findings from the Revolut research, while Irish Times columnist and economist David McWilliams discusses how his image was used by scammers last year to con people out of money. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph free \">Also, research this week from the ESRI suggests the property industry is using ghost bids and other tactics to create a frenzy and nudge buyers into increasing their bids for properties here. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph free \">It found participants\u2019 bids were pushed higher in open auctions managed by estate agents or online platforms than in sealed bid auctions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph free \">Owen Reilly is a leading estate agent in Dublin, and he discusses how the research chimed with his own experience in the industry. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph free \">Produced by John Casey with JJ Vernon on sound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"First up on this week\u2019s episode of Inside Business, we look at new research this week from Revolut&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8511,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,63563,25744,823,3662,61,542,60,53957,8581,606],"class_list":["post-293795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-david-mcwilliams","tag-esri","tag-facebook","tag-housing-crisis","tag-ie","tag-instagram","tag-ireland","tag-owen-reilly","tag-revolut","tag-x"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}