Sweep required in SERPs – Google still needs to put in extra effort to clean up its search results, which scammers use as a showcase to give visibility to their malicious websites.
When Google advertises to crypto scammers
In a tweet on October 27, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao warned that Google is displaying phishing sites in its resultswhen users type the query “coinmarketcap” in the search bar.
Although Google has strict cryptocurrency policies in place, criminals still manage to use the search engine to promote their websites. The latter sometimes even manage to rank higher in search results than the official sites of blockchain and crypto projects.
The consequences of this inability of Google to permanently ban all phishing sites from its results, amount to millions of dollars stolen from the victims of fraudsters.
In November last year, cybersecurity firm CheckPoint published a report which indicated that scammers managed to steal $500,000 in cryptocurrenciesusing Google Ads to promote their phishing sites, which matched copies of those of MetaMask and Phantom.
More recently, last April, blockchain security firm SlowMist identified a phishing site linked to Terra, which fraudsters were promoting using Google Ads as well. Using this strategy, the thieves allegedly got their hands on approximately 4.31 million dollars de Luna Classic (LUNC), between April 12 and 21.
If legitimate crypto projects have lowered their investments in Google ads, fraudsters could still continue to use this leverage, to attract as many victims as possible into their nets.
>> Yields that play with the bear market, it’s on AscendEX (commercial link) <<
