Advertising described on this page is prohibited on Adxe absolutely. No licence unlocks it, no market permits it, and no approval process applies to it. Submitting it is a breach of the Advertiser Terms and Conditions.
Illegal products and activity
- Anything unlawful to sell, promote or possess in the market being targeted.
- Assistance with breaking the law: document forgery, identity fraud, hacking or account-takeover services, exam or credential fraud, evading law enforcement.
- Stolen goods, stolen data, breached credential dumps, and services for buying or checking them.
- Human trafficking, illegal migration services, and the sale of organs or people.
- Endangered species, protected wildlife products, and prohibited animal parts.
Weapons and explosives
- Firearms, firearm parts, magazines, ammunition and instructions for making or converting them, including 3D-printed and untraceable firearms.
- Explosives, fireworks that require a licence, and materials or instructions for making an explosive device.
- Knives sold as weapons, brass knuckles, batons and similar concealed or offensive weapons.
- Tactical products marketed for use against other people rather than for sport or professional use.
Drugs and controlled substances
- Recreational and illegal drugs, and any product marketed as an equivalent to one.
- Drug paraphernalia, growing and manufacturing equipment, and instructions.
- Products marketed for defeating a drug test.
- Recreational cannabis, CBD and hemp-derived products, in every market, regardless of local legality.
- Kratom, nitrous oxide for recreational use, poppers, and unclassified research chemicals sold for consumption.
- Prescription medicines offered without a prescription, and pharmacies operating outside a recognised licensing regime.
Tobacco, vaping and nicotine
- Cigarettes, cigars, loose tobacco, shisha, chewing tobacco and smoking accessories.
- E-cigarettes, vapes, vape liquids and disposable nicotine devices.
- Nicotine pouches and other oral nicotine products.
- Products, brands or lifestyle content whose purpose is to advertise any of the above indirectly.
Adult and sexual content
- Pornography, escort services, strip clubs, webcam and adult subscription platforms.
- Sexually explicit or suggestive imagery, nudity, and creatives whose framing, cropping or posing is sexual in intent.
- Sex toys, sexual enhancement products and fetish merchandise.
- Anything sexualising a minor, or a person presented as one. We report this rather than merely reject it.
Hate, harassment and violence
- Content attacking or demeaning a person or group by race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status or serious illness.
- Hate organisations, their symbols, and content promoting or fundraising for them.
- Terrorist and extremist content, recruitment and glorification.
- Harassment, doxxing, stalking tools, and services for monitoring a partner, family member or employee without their knowledge.
- Graphic violence, gore, mutilation, accident and crime-scene imagery, animal cruelty, and self-harm or suicide content.
Financial deception
- Get-rich-quick schemes and any promise of guaranteed, risk-free or unrealistic returns.
- Pyramid schemes, chain letters, matrix schemes and multi-level marketing recruitment.
- Binary options, and contracts for difference or leveraged trading marketed to the general public as a way to make easy money.
- Fake celebrity, government or news endorsements used to promote an investment. This is the single most common fraud pattern in our category and it is met with immediate account closure.
- Recovery-room services that target people who have already been defrauded.
- Unregistered securities offerings, and investment schemes promoted without the licences the market requires.
- Advance-fee lending, guaranteed loan approval regardless of credit, and cheque-cashing or debt-relief offers that conceal their cost.
Health deception
- Cures, treatments or preventatives for cancer, diabetes, dementia, HIV, heart disease or any other serious condition, where the claim is not supported by regulatory approval.
- Miracle-cure framing: "one weird trick", "doctors hate this", "banned by the FDA", "what your doctor will not tell you".
- Before-and-after body imagery, and weight-loss claims tied to a timeframe or an amount.
- Content that shames a person about their body, their skin, their weight or their appearance in order to sell a remedy.
- Anti-vaccination content and medical misinformation.
- Unapproved medical devices and diagnostic services that make clinical claims.
Deceptive and disruptive advertising
- Cloaking: showing our reviewers or our systems something different from what a user is shown. This is the most serious breach in this document.
- Creatives dressed up as system alerts, virus warnings, battery or storage warnings, software update prompts or messaging notifications.
- Fake interface elements — play buttons, cursors, close buttons, form fields, progress bars — drawn onto a creative to attract a click.
- Impersonating a news outlet, a public authority, a bank or another brand, including through a lookalike domain.
- Automatic downloads, forced redirects, dialler or SMS triggers, and pages that break the browser back button.
- Malware, spyware, adware, browser hijackers, unwanted extensions and deceptive software bundles.
- Phishing, and any page collecting credentials or payment details under a false identity.
Counterfeit and infringement
- Counterfeit, replica and knock-off goods.
- Pirated media, cracked software, licence-key resale and streaming piracy services.
- Use of another party’s trade mark, logo, product imagery or brand name without the right to use it.
- Ticket resale that breaches the terms of the original sale or the law of the market.
Exploitation and sensitive events
- Advertising built on a tragedy, disaster, conflict, death or public emergency in order to attract attention or donations.
- Fundraising for a cause the advertiser is not authorised to collect for.
- Content designed to interfere with an election, a census or a public health programme, or to suppress participation in one.
- Shocking, disgusting or distressing imagery used purely as a click device — skin conditions, parasites, injuries, decay, insects.
Advertising directed at children
- Campaigns targeted at children, and campaigns knowingly placed on child-directed inventory.
- Creatives that use cartoons, characters or presentation designed to appeal primarily to children.
- Collecting information from children, or promoting a product or service to them directly.
Reconsideration
A determination under this section is not subject to reconsideration on the basis that a particular version of the advertising is acceptable; no version is. Reconsideration is available only where the determination misidentified the advertising — a health product classified as a miracle cure when it makes no such claim, for example. Requesting reconsideration.