Google is to ban cryptocurrency ads from June.
The tech giant will also ban ads for other unregulated or speculative financial products such as binary options and financial spread betting.
The company’s director of sustainable ads Scott Spencer wrote in a separate blog post that Google took down 3.2 billion ads that violated its advertising policies in 2017, nearly double the 2016 figure.
“That’s more than 100 bad ads per second!” he wrote. “This means we’re able to block the majority of bad ad experiences, like malvertising and phishing scams, before the scams impact people.
“We blocked 79 million ads in our network for attempting to send people to malware-laden sites, and removed 400,000 of these unsafe sites last year.
“And we removed 66 million ‘trick-to-click’ ads as well as 48 million ads that were attempting to get users to install unwanted software.
“Last year we removed 320,000 publishers from our ad network for violating our publisher policies and blacklisted nearly 90,000 websites and 700,000 mobile apps.”
He added: “As consumer trends evolve, as our methods to protect the open web get better, so do online scams.
“Improving the ads experience across the web, whether that’s removing harmful ads or intrusive ads, will continue to be a top priority for us.”
Twitter also recently announced measures to combat the promotion of cryptocurrency scams on its social media platform, while Facebook has banned adverts around cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings.