This is one major reason why blocking ads is now a safety issue. If you have a family member who, for whatever reason, might be fooled by this sort of ad, install an effective adblocker on all their browsers and uninstall/disable browsers that don't support an effective adblocker.

If you are reliant on ad revenue, you should be expressing your displeasure to google right now.

When Google broke the original uBlock origin and made people switch to uBlock Lite, I found out about the change because my grandmother called me in a panic. She saw an ad like the one in this article on her Facebook page and clicked it, then it was telling her to call Microsoft support because her computer was infected.

Like, Google removing Adblock directly caused that. Facebook allowing the ad caused that. The ad led to malicious page that was also hosted on a Microsoft thing, and I ended up reporting it to them too. Microsoft at least promptly took it down within a half hour after I reported it. But these big companies have almost no incentive to stop this, and some of them directly profit off of these scams happening.

My mother has:

* Got me a "BearSkin" jacket from youtube's incessant advertisement.

* Signed up for a $250 subscription to "The Daily Beast" when she was watching youtube tv right before bed and probably subscribed when she meant to just view.

* Signed up for Norton Antivirus when she got a gif that looks like a popup that tells you have a virus and it opens to a Subscription Plan on her phone.

None of these things were things she particularly wanted, some she didn't even consent to, but a combination of paid promotion / advertisement / confusion about the UI is basically doing things against her will.

I literally got her Youtube Premium just so she stops seeing all the ads that are feeding on her. It is a problem.