T'was the holidays at Starbucks red aprons tied up, warm wishes and names written on festive red cups.

The chocolatey mousse latte is here to cozy things up, topped with mokker cream moose for a finishing touch.

Two lattes in hand, one for you and one for me, because together truly is the best place to be.

The holidays are served now at Starbucks. Subject to availability while stocks last.

If you open up Facebook or Instagram and search for, let's say, Elon Musk, the odds are pretty good that you're going to be served some questionable ads.

In which Elon is, you know, offering investment tips or, you know, giving away Tesla is in a raffle or, you know, wants to, like, talk to you

person, talk to his fans one-on-one.

That's Jeff Horwitz, a tech reporter for Reuters.

And depending on your level of internet savvy, you might click on one of those ads.

In which case, meta-system systems will serve you more fraudulent ads

because you basically kind of flagged yourself as a bit of a dummy.

Apologies.

But you can see where this is going.

That's kind of how the system does work, right?

It's like, oh, who's a good market for scam ads?

And the answer is people who

previously clicked on scam ads. And the computer will figure that out.

Some of these ads are obviously scammy. Elon, probably not going to have a one-on-one chat with Facebook users, but there are other

scam ads that are harder to spot. Jeff found one for a set of McCormick Spices that looked

honestly like a pretty good holiday gift. The hallmark of a sophisticated scam is that when you

look at the ad for it, you're not like, oh, that thing's

fake. And while the idea that there are scammy ads on meta's platforms may not surprise you,

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