In the US at least there is a lot (and by that I mean like maybe more than half) of civil case law around seller liability for defective or 'dual use' products.

In the US at least there is a lot (and by that I mean like maybe more than half) of civil case law around seller liability for defective or 'dual use' products. In the 70's some cities tried to sue hardware stores for selling spray paint that taggers were using, in several jurisdictions you can find authorities trying to sue vendors of lock picking and/or safe opening tools, etc. My non-lawyer reading of all that is that if it is reasonable to assume that the vendor didn't know, at the time of sale, what the customer was going to do with it, they aren't liable. Once a vendor has been notified that these units are doing these sorts of things they will stop selling them. Its sadly very prescriptive in that if Newegg gets a notice that "WatchFunTV" streaming sticks are doing this, they will remove that brand but if the same hardware shows up from the same vendor as "SuperTVStreamer" or some such, that product won't be banned until someone does the test and then notifies the sellers. It's cat and mouse all the time. Now the people who could do something about it, the ad networks like Google, do not do anything because ad revenue is ad revenue, people buying the ads cannot prove that the click was false so hey who can say it was? Which is why ad fraud is a perennial favorite of crooks. The people being ripped off don't have any way to prove it without a lot of support from the ad network traffic data which is "proprietary". Really stupid ad fraud gets shut down, but put a bit of care into it so that the Ad network and claim ignorance? You can do that all day. Just don't get greedy and try to pull in more than say 30 or 50 thousand dollars a month. Remember, the IAB said in 2025 alone Ad Revenue was $300B[1] so 2% of that is only $6B and any network with 2% or less of undetected fraud is considered a "high quality" ad network. So yeah, ad fraud is the gift that keeps on giving. [1] https://www.iab.com/insights/internet-advertising-revenue-report-full-year-2025/ https://www.iab.com/insights/internet-advertising-revenue-re...