Phony Google Advert Redirected Visitors onto Scam Site Instead of Amazon

A few Google users who were doing a Web hunt to access amazon.com on November 23rd the Thanksgiving Day, landed on a fake advert which showed them onto one scam site on the eve of the year's day for maximum shopping. The advert could be seen as the first search result when users put the keywords for Amazon.

The ad website had a phone-number which if dialed connected to a man claiming his name as Robert while he spoke with an accent of South Asia. The man asked to tell the error number which the pop-up ad showed to use for solving the problem while he'd require having access to the caller's PC in remote manner. Moreover, the man stated that he was attached to Microsoft by virtue of work inside New York City. CBS News posted this, November 23, 2017.

The man soon became excited when enquired if the website had any malicious purpose or scammed visitors into giving away cash to obtain actually fake anti-malware software. If the visitors made another phone-call, a man replied stating the so-called malware problem was possible to rectify if they paid $149.99 once for all.

Google while removing the ad stated that the ad's display was a violation of the company's policies. Nothing is known about the number of users seeing the ad while doing a search for Amazon. And whilst the ad seemed as certain link to the website of Amazon, clicking on it actually diverted onto a URL containing an application active on some FB web-page. The diversion, which was brief, could enable bypassing the automated scam identifying programs of Google. It is not clear what way the application diverted visitors outside Facebook and onto one fake support site posing as being of the support team of Microsoft. The bogus support site contained an alert message about malware infecting users' PCs.

An intense scrutiny is being done of Facebook, Google as well as Twitter regarding their ad platforms being used for disseminating misinformation/suspicious content. Congress members belonging to both parties recently urged the ad platforms for strengthening their monitoring over advertising clients.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/29/2017