Google AdWords Fooled by Scammers

Google AdWords has revenues of $30 billion or so a year. With that sort of money involved, you might think the AdWords ad review system would be pretty good.

It seems it could still do with a bit of work.

One group of scammers has been fooling Google for at least 6 weeks now.

I first noticed their ads on new year’s eve. They were tricking Google into running ads that looked to be for the Daily Mail. When clicked, the ads took you to a page that tried to trick you into buying an overpriced subscription. I later discovered (here) that the scam ads had been running at least since 12th December 2011.

Incredibly, the scammers are still getting away with it. The latest ad I’ve spotted appears if you search Google.co.uk for “anti-ageing cream”. Now the ad claims to be for iVillage:

Rather than take you to iVillage, though, the ad takes you to the same scammy landing page as with the previous ‘Daily Mail’ ads (though on a different domain now).

This kind of thing makes my blood boil.

These scammers are, sadly, conning a lot of people out of money.

I’ve reported the ads to the Google AdWords team, so hopefully they’ll stop them soon.



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