Even though search engines have evolved immensely over the past two decades, there are still some loopholes that fraudsters can exploit to scam users. A typical example is scammers misusing search engine advertisements to direct people to deceptive websites that mimic the official ones—and in most cases, they succeed.
How does the search engine ads scam work? How can you identify this scam? Can you prevent yourself from falling prey to it?
What Is the Search Engine Ads Scam?
The search engine ads scam is a phishing scam where scammers run deceptive ads on popular search engines by manipulating search engine advertising. Although search engine algorithms don’t allow misleading ads to pass during evaluation, they sometimes slip through anyway.
Consequently, scammers gain a top spot among paid results above Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) for certain queries. Because scammers make their ads look official, they appear to be legitimate. In this way, they easily entice people to click on their ads and visit fraudulent websites rather than real ones.
Given that the ad format looks similar to that of an ad from the official company and that the ad appears above the official website in SERP, it’s natural for users to click on the ad, believing it’s real. Scammers use this technique to lure users to their phishing sites.
But how exactly does this scam work?
How Do the Search Engine Ad Scams Work?
When you use any search engine, you’ll see…
