Google steers Americans looking for health care into “junk insurance”
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Toronto (THURSDAY!), San Diego and Seattle! Full schedule here.
Being "the enshittification guy" means that people expect you to weigh in on every service or platform that has been deliberately worsened to turn a buck. It's an impossible task (and a boring one besides). There's too much of this shit, and it's all so mid – a real "banality of enshittification" situation.
So these days, I really only take note of fractally enshittified things, exponentially enshittified things, omnienshittified things. Things like the fact that Google is sending people searching for health care plans to "junk insurance" that take your money and then pretty much just let you die:
https://pluralistic.net/junk-insurance
"Junk insurance" is a health insurance plan that is designed as a short-term plan that you might use for a couple of days or a week or two, say, if you experience a gap in coverage as you move between two jobs. These plans can exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions and typically exclude niceties like emergency room visits and hospitalization:
Crucially, these plans to not comply with the Affordable Care Act, which requires comprehensive coverage, and bans exclusions for pre-existing conditions. These plans only exist because of loopholes in the ACA, designed for very small-scale employers or temporary coverage.
The one thing junk insurance does not skimp on is sales and marketing. These plans outbid the rest of the market when it comes to buying Google search ads, meaning that anyone who uses Google to research health insurance will be inundated with ads for these shitty plans. The plans also spend a fortune on "search engine optimization" – basically, gaming the Google algorithm – so that the non-ad Google results for health insurance are also saturated with these garbage plans.
The plans also staff up boiler-rooms full of silver-tongued high-pressure sales staff who pick up on the first ring and hard-sell you on their plans, deliberately misleading you into locking into their garbage plans.
That's right, locking in. While Obamacare is nominally a "market based" healthcare system (because Medicare For All would be communism), you are only allowed to change vendors twice per year, during "open enrollment," these narrow biannual windows in which you get to "vote with your wallet" against a plan that has screwed you over and/or endangered your life.
Which means that if a fast-talking salesdroid from a junk insurance company can trick you into signing up for a garbage plan that will leave you bankrupt and/or dead if you have a major health crisis, you are stuck for at least six months in that trap, and won't escape without first handing over thousands of dollars to that scumbag's boss.
Amazingly enough, these aren't even the worst kinds of garbage health plans that you can buy in America: those would be the religious "health share" programs that sleazy evangelical "entrepreneurs" suck their co-religionists into, which cost the world and leave you high and dry when you or your kids get hurt or sick:
The fact that there are multiple kinds of scam health insurance in America, in which companies are legally permitted to take your money and then deny you care (even more than the "non-scam" insurance plans do) shows you the problem with turning health into a market. "Caveat emptor" may make sense when you're buying a used blender at a yard-sale. Apply it to the system that's supposed to take care of you if you're diagnosed with cancer, hit by a bus, or develop eclampsia, and it's a literally fatal system.
This is just one of the ways in which the uniparty is so terrible for Americans. The Republicans want to swap out shitty regulated for-profit health insurance with disastrous unregulated for-profit health insurance, and then give you a couple thousand bucks to yolo on a plan that seems OK to you:
This is like letting Fanduel run your country's health system: everyday people are expected to place fifty-way parlay bets on their health, juggling exclusions, co-pays, deductibles, and network coverage in their head. Bet wrong, and you go bankrupt (if you're lucky), or just die (if you're not).
Democrats, meanwhile, want to maintain the (garbage) status quo (because Medicare for All is communism), and they'll shut down the government to make it clear that they want this. But then they'll capitulate, because they want it, but not that badly.
But like I say, America is an Enshittification Nation, and I don't have time or interest for cataloging mere unienshittificatory aspects of life here. To preserve my sanity and discretionary time, I must limit myself to documenting the omnienshittificatory scams that threaten us for every angle at once.
Which brings me back to Google. Without Google, these junk insurance scams would be confined to the margins. They'd have to resort to pyramid selling, or hand-lettered roadside signs, or undisclosed paid plugs in religious/far-right newsletters.
But because Google has utterly succumbed to enshittification, and because Google has an illegal monopoly – a 90% market share – that it maintains by bribing competitors like Apple to stay out of the search market, junk insurance scams can make bank – and ruin Americans' lives wholesale – by either tricking or paying Google to push junk insurance on unsuspecting searchers.
This isn't merely a case of Google losing the SEO and spam wars to shady operators. As we learned in last year's antitrust case (where Google was convicted of operating an illegal search monopoly), Google deliberately worsened its search results, in order to force you search multiple times (and see multiple screens full of ads) as a way to goose search revenue:
Google didn't just lose that one antitrust case, either. It lost three cases, as three federal judges determined that Google secured and maintains an illegal monopoly that allows it to control the single most important funnel for knowledge and truth for the majority of people on Earth. The company whose mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," now serves slop, ads, spam and scams because its customers have nowhere to go, so why bother spending money making search good (especially when there's money to be made from bad search results)?
Google isn't just too big to fail, it's also too big to jail. One of the judges who found Google guilty of maintaining an illegal monopoly decided not to punish them for it, and to allow them to continue bribing Apple to stay out of the search market, because (I'm not making this up), without that $20b+ annual bribe, Apple might not be able to afford to make cool new iPhone features:
Once a company is too big to fail and too big to jail, it becomes too big to care. Google could prevent slop, spam and scams from overrunning its results (and putting its users lives and fortunes at risk), it just *chooses not to:
Google is the internet's absentee landlord. Anyone who can make a buck by scamming you can either pay Google to help, or trick Google into helping, or – as is the case with junk insurance – both:
America has the world's stupidest health care system, an industry that has grown wildly profitable by charging Americans the highest rates in the rich world, while delivering the worst health outcomes in the rich world, while slashing health workers' pay and eroding their working conditions.
It's omnienshittified, a partnership between the enshittified search giant and the shittiest parts of the totally enshittified health industry.
It's also a reminder of what we stand to gain when we finally smash Google and break it up: disciplining our search industry will make it competitive, regulatable, and force it to side with the public against all kinds of scammers. Junk insurance should be banned, but even if we just end the junk insurance industry's ability to pay the world's only major search engine to help it kill us, that would be a huge step forward.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
How Click Fraud Fuels Lead Fraud in BFSI Sector: Impact and Solution
The BFSI sector runs some of the most high-stakes digital campaigns in advertising. With customer lifetime values stretching across years of loans, credit cards, investments, and insurance renewals, every lead matters enormously. But that’s precisely what makes BFSI such a lucrative target for fraud.
Performance campaigns in BFSI are built around a simple promise: pay per lead, optimise for cost per acquisition. It’s efficient in theory. In practice, it’s where exploitation begins. Because a bad click isn’t just a bad click — it travels downstream, pollutes the funnel, and contaminates every stage below it. Fake clicks become fake leads. Fake leads inflate CAC. And inflated CAC quietly bleeds campaign budgets dry.
This blog covers –
Why BFSI Brands Are Prime Targets for Lead Fraud
Average Bot Traffic on BFSI Campaigns
The Invisible Journey of Lead Fraud in BFSI
How Lead Fraud Impacts BFSI Campaigns
Why Surface Level Detection Falls Short
What Smarter Click Fraud Detection Looks Like in BFSI
Conclusion
Why BFSI Brands Are Prime Targets for Click Fraud
Few industries spend on digital ads as aggressively as banks, insurers, fintechs, and financial services. The reason is clear: customer value in BFSI is unusually high. Hence the cost running campaigns is higher.
A single customer can generate returns for years through loans, credit cards, investments, insurance renewals, or financial subscriptions.
Because of this, keywords like “instant loan,” “credit card instant approval,” “trading app,” and “term insurance” often carry some of the highest CPCs in digital advertising.
For fraudsters, that creates a perfect setup. The higher the cost per lead, the more profitable fake leads become.
Fraud networks know BFSI brands can’t slow acquisition cost, especially during festive seasons, loan drives, tax-filing months, or insurance renewals. That’s why BFSI campaigns often attract unusually high levels of invalid traffic, fake installs, and manipulated engagements across both web and app ecosystems.
What makes it worse: today’s fraudulent activity rarely looks obviously fake. It blends into normal user behaviour, making detection far harder than before.
The Scale of the Problem: Bot Traffic on BFSI Campaigns
On BFSI campaigns, bot and invalid traffic routinely accounts for a significant share of total traffic often sitting well into double digits.
The above table reveals a far more serious reality for BFSI advertisers globally.
Bot traffic for different BFSI campaigns ranged from 9% to 28% of total campaign traffic. It is not a minor inefficiency; it contributes to click fraud and later contributing to lead fraud, a massive setback for brands.
In BFSI, losing nearly one-fourth of campaign traffic to bots means brands are potentially pouring millions into fake engagement, distorted performance metrics, and audiences that never truly existed.
The Invisible Journey: How Click Fraud Becomes Lead Fraud in BFSI
BFSI marketers are accountable for metrics that sit deep in the funnel:
Cost per approved loan
Cost per activated credit card
Cost per funded account
Cost per issued policy
These aren’t click metrics. They are business outcomes. Which is exactly why click-level fraud gets missed for so long, it enters at the top and the damage only becomes legible at the bottom, by which point the cause is buried under months of campaign data.
The journey looks like this:
Impression → Fraudulent Click → Fake Lead → Inflated CAC → Low Conversion → Revenue Gap
Three Ways the Funnel Gets Exploited
Fake Leads
Bots or traffic farms fill out lead forms with fabricated or recycled personal data. These submissions pass basic validation — name, phone, email format checks — but carry no intent. They exist only to trigger the publisher’s payout.
Punched Leads
More deliberate than bot-generated fakes. Publishers or affiliates manually manufacture form fills, sometimes using real personal data sourced from other lists, to meet contractual lead volume targets. These are harder to filter because they look human. They fail at sales qualification, not at form submission.
Explore The Complete Guide Here
Click Fraud: The Complete Guide for Marketers in 2026
A few years ago, a globally recognised brand cut two-thirds of its annual online advertising budget around $100 million. What happened next revealed a shocking truth about the digital advertising industry.
There was little to no drop in performance. Conversions held steady, demand didn’t collapse, and the business continued as usual. The reason wasn’t efficiency; it was ad fraud and the brand that showed the mirror to the world was uber.
Fast forward to 2026, and the problem has only become more complex.
Organic Poaching: The Overlooked Threat to Affiliate Performance
All performance marketing activities have one thing in common: getting new clients and making more sales.
In order to do so, brands spend lots of money on organic demand generation with ASO, SEO, CRM, branding campaigns, influencers, and content marketing. In parallel, they depend on affiliate channels in order to get more exposure and users.
Affiliate marketing has become an integral part of the growth strategy for such companies as Amazon, Flipkart, and other e-commerce and fintech leaders. When managed well, it helps to install apps, gain new clients, and grow acquisition in an efficient way.
What is Install Fraud? How to Solve Install Fraud?
Advertising platforms optimize for signals—not intent.
In mobile marketing, the most important signal is the install. More installs usually mean a campaign is working. Platforms see this, assume success, and push more budget in the same direction.
This is where install fraud begins.
Fake installs are easier and cheaper to generate than real users. Fraudsters use bots, device farms, or incentivized tactics to create large volumes of installs that look genuine on the surface. Since the numbers look good, platforms assume the campaign is performing well. Budgets increase. The same sources get more spend.
How to Identify Affiliate Fraud: Key Signs, Impact & Prevention Strategies
Consider a fast-growing ecommerce brand with strong organic traffic and a well-run affiliate program. Revenue looks solid every month, but one odd trend appears: a mid-tier affiliate suddenly becomes the highest contributor, while trusted, high-quality partners stay flat.
At first, it feels like a performance win.
However, a closer look reveals the truth.
Most of those “affiliate-driven” traffic was from users who were already interested to buy from the brand. At the last moment, the credit shifts to the affiliate — even though they didn’t bring in a new customer. To burst this bubble, focus on what really adds value.
Marketer’s Guide to Ad Fraud – What it is and How to Solve it
If your campaigns are costing you more than they’re performing, it’s time to rebuild your strategy, because the issue might be lying in your traffic itself.
Ad fraud has become one of the biggest reasons impacting your campaigns and marketing budgets across walled gardens, open networks, affiliate platforms, apps, and programmatic ecosystems.
The first half of 2025 recorded an average global ad fraud rate of 39.7%, and fraud peaked at 49% in June, the highest in five years. With AI-driven bots, fake users, and manipulated attribution becoming more advanced, the financial impact is far deeper than most marketers realize.
You launch a referral program with the intention to acquire new users to your app. When analysing your campaign progress, you see that your referral champion is a single user who somehow ‘invited 200 people overnight’.
You feel confident to spend more on these campaigns.
On your dashboard there are 200 people, but upon deeper analysis you see that only a few retain as users. That’s a sign that something is not right. It’s not the usual invalid traffic, but a more advanced and difficult version of ad fraud. Referral and coupon fraud are advanced types of mobile ad fraud which impacts the action driven KPI’s and can skew your data.
