Google has recently announced that it will ban online advertisements promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings in June, as a part to crackdown on the marketing of an emerging breed of high-risk financial product. Earlier this year, Facebook India took a similar step on cryptocurrency, because as per reports, they are associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.

In a blog post titled ‘Financial Services: New restricted financial products policy (June 2018)’, published by Google, the company informed that they will change its existing financial product restriction list in June this year. As per reports, while Google has not explained in details the exact reason behind the ban, but the new policy comes at a time, when regulators in US have been keeping a hawk’s eye on cryptocurrency projects that claim unrealistic investment opportunities. The move to ban ads involving bitcoin and initial coin offering  is in bid to prevent cryptocurrency-related promotions that may deceive investors.

Reportedly, it is expected that affiliate marketing companies will suffer huge damage because the policy highlights that aggregators and affiliates providing services to the cryptocurrency arena will not be allowed to advertise either. According to a report published in Bloomberg, last year, Google removed 79 million ads for attracting online clickers to websites with malware. The company suspended 7,000 customer accounts for ads that impersonated a news article -- what Google calls "tabloid cloaking" -- and blocked more than 12,000 websites for copying information from other publications.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 14, 2018 04:47 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).