Starting June, Alphabet Inc's Google will ban online advertisements promoting cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings, financial spread betting, etc, the company said in a statement.
The move by Google is part of its new restricted financial products policy (June 2018) and it follows a similar ban social networking site Facebook announced earlier this year.
"We don't have a crystal ball to know where the future is going to go with cryptocurrencies, but we've seen enough consumer harm or potential for consumer harm that it's an area that we want to approach with extreme caution," CNBC quoted Google's director of sustainable ads, Scott Spencer, as saying about the ban.
The company said that in June, it would update the financial service policy to restrict the advertisement of Contracts for Difference, rolling spot forex, and financial spread betting.
In addition, advertisements for the binary options and synonymous products, cryptocurrencies and related content will also be no longer be allowed.
This news came soon after Google released its annual ads report on March 14. The search giant said it took down more than 3.2 billion ads in 2017 that violated its advertising policies, which is more than 100 bad ads per second.
The company said it blocked 79 million ads in its network for attempting to send people to malware-laden sites, and removed 400,000 such sites from its ad network over the same period.
Google pointed out that in 2017, it removed 320,000 publishers from its ad network for violating publisher policies, and blacklisted nearly 90,000 websites and 700,000 mobile apps.
In January, Facebook banned all advertising for cryptocurrencies saying they are frequently associated with misleading promotional practices.
