What is cloaking in advertising?
Cloaking is showing one version of an ad or landing page to reviewers, scanners and platforms, and a different version to real users. Bad actors use it to get scams, malware or banned products approved: moderation systems see a harmless page, while targeted users are sent to phishing sites, fake stores or prohibited offers. Every major ad platform bans it.
Cloaking relies on detecting who is looking: IP addresses of platform reviewers, known scanner user agents, time of day or geography. The same trick is used to hide malvertising and deceptive landing pages, and in some search arbitrage schemes to disguise low-quality pages from ad reviewers.
Detection means scanning from many clean, residential-looking vantage points and comparing what each sees. Google, Meta and others have sued cloaking-service vendors, and the practice is a common factor in scam ads on social platforms.