Ads are impersonating government websites in Google results, despite ban
themarkup.org
themarkup.org
This stuff needs to be regulated, companies like Google need to be held accountable for what they serve up to users. No more hiding behind this shield of "we're just a platform" when they damn well know they're the platform. It's all fun and games until your (grand)parents lose 20K to some scumbag scammers.
Regulated? Fraud is illegal.
It needs to be PROSECUTED.
If the government forms are byzantine and you go to a lawyer and pay them $250 to fill them for you, you aren't being scammed.
If you visit a web site that clearly tells you that it's a third party website, you can waste your time with the horrible government site, or you can pay 10 bucks and use their optimized form, you're not being scammed.
If the web site now shrinks their disclosure a bit, maybe moves it below the fold, jacks up the price... at some point 90% of the people would agree that they're "scamming" people, in the colloquial sense, but this lack of a clear line makes it hard to charge them criminally.
The way to handle this would be to
1. require clear disclosure for any kind of "online 'government bureaucracy help' service", with everything (font size, contrast, cannot be showing anything else at the same time to avoid drowning the disclosure out)
2. Make providing such "services" without the disclosure punishable by serious jail time, confiscation of any earnings, etc.
3. Actually enforce it, including through international arrest warrants, going after credit card providers when the scammers are abroad, etc.
4. Follow up to see if the problem went away and adjust the requirements until it does.
Omit any of these, and the problem will stay. And right now, none of these seems to happen.
Those companies are scamming you through the government, like they do with taxes
But let's not nitpick. The example number for a non-scam full-disclosure website was $10. That seems legitimate to me.
You provide the incentives to the countries to fix their problem by cutting them completely off. If someone using a bank in Cyprus did it, you tell Cyprus government that in 48 hours the Fed will block all transactions with that bank and you block it. They move to another bank, you repeat it. Eventually Cyprus government ( and Cyprus banks ) have to make a choice - continue to tolerate scammers using their banks and be locked out totally out of the US financial system or crack down on the scammers.
Follow the money and report the issue to the institutions along the line. If they refuse to shut down the scammers and to stop facilitating their crimes, shut the institutions down for being an accessory.
Don't get me wrong; I'd love to see them picking up trash on the side of the highway for next twenty years of their life, or worse. But calling everything "terrorism" really reminds me of the years following 2001.
YES - THE NAVY
Recently a big dutch retailer got caught out by a small thing, a suppliers administrative email got hacked and the company as a result wired a couple of million to the wrong recipient.
The real problem in this case is that Google has a perverse incentive to allow these ads-as-serps. Personally I think Google should be named as a co-conspirator in fraud cases like these. That would get them to clear this up pronto.
This is a total scam and should be dealt with accordingly.
This is not "better advertising", it's just a scam.
The law is real but only applies in very specific circumstances and the letters come from companies graciously offering to sell you overpriced posters.
It freaked the hell out of my partner when we got that, had to explain to her at 3AM that we weren't going to lose our business over a poster. That kind of stuff really rattles your bones when you've got so much going on already with a new business.
Naturally, after a little digging, I discovered that her email was using the same pw and had also been compromised (hackers deleted the emails from Instagram about the email address change).
As ever, the main issue is that getting through to Instagram to get any real help seems impossible. Which sucks, because surely changing all the details on an Instagram account should flag something on their side.
I can't believe they act as they don't know what's going on and have no means to deter this. They SHOULD BE LIABLE!
Now I log in from a city in the Netherlands, 20 minutes later. From a phone, again, empty cookie jar. Even with a helicopter there's no way to make it there that fast. Should the login be denied?
(The answer is "no, because I've traveled to another city to visit a conference, and the conference network was routed in a weird way and the GeoIP data for their exit IP was incorrect".)
People jump locations all the time, for reasons like remote desktop sessions, mobile roaming, personal and company VPNs, etc.
Locking out a real user has a significant cost.
I permanently lost access to may aim account a while back because I tried to connect while traveling out of country.
The key, imo, is 'normal'. A new account has no activity, but an account that has, say, 3 years of only ever logging in from IPs located in, say, Detroit area suddenly has logins from Europe and attempts to change email/pass/etc while activity is still coming from Detroit - that's an anomaly. But until there's historical data to compare against, you can't really know. And... unless you've got a lot of computing power to check for that all the time (or outsource that sort of stuff), you probably can't detect that.
I'm well aware that EINs are free, having had about half-a-dozen of them for various businesses.
I googled something like IRS EIN and clicked the link. I saw a page that looked exactly like the IRS EIN page as I remembered it. I filled out my information. When I clicked submit, I saw a payment page. It was only then I realized I had been duped and looked at the domain.
There is a related issue when you register a new company here in Germany: As soon as the new entity is added to the company house (called “Handelsregister”), you will start to receive fake invoices from scam companies.
These invoice look very similar to official ones and some even use the official seal of the state (see https://www.firma.de/en/company-formation/beware-of-fake-han... for examples).
If you don’t pay close attention you can easily mistake these invoice for official ones.
This scam is quite well-known and has been going on for years. To further add to the insult - the companies that send these fake invoices are usually German entities as well, not some obscure shell companies in remote islands and yet besides warnings from the government it seems that little is happening.
I find it infuriating and don’t understand why it is even allowed to send another party that you never had any relation with an invoice for a service that you actually haven’t performed yet.
The infuriating part is that it's so well-known, that both the physical government offices and the online forms where you can register your small business, are plastered with big, attention-grabbing reminders that the registration process is free. The government knows about this scam to the point of warning people about it, and yet it continues.
There's a certain threshold of complaints, unfortunately. The FTC only has the resources to go after big fish. But, one thing I did learn from reading the FTC complaint is that credit card chargebacks do work, after a fashion; the company was getting repeatedly booted off of merchant accounts for accruing lots of chargebacks. I bet if people aggressively charged back the EIN scammers it'd end up hurting them too.
That's not what decides elections. If there is too much crime that can be an extra excuse to raise more taxes.
I reported frauds to the police in two cases and they didn't do anything despite having all the evidence and location of the perpetrators (even after arresting one of them in one case).
A civil case didn't work as well because they owned nothing on paper.
The only way to get justice is to pay someone to break their knees or steal what they stole from you from them.
If these crimes were costing the society more than keeping perpetrators locked up then situation would have changed. Another reason is that some people, by their nature, just cannot have a "normal" job and so they hustle. If you take away non-violent options, then there is a chance they'd turn to something violent to achieve their goals and that would be costly.
I couldn't help thinking that that Ad was a lot like a locksmith accepting a few bucks to let some burglar into my house no questions asked, and then explaining to the cops that he's just as much a victim as I am.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Locksmith/comments/41ydjn/serious_q...
It's gotten to the point where spam sites with out of date articles are now ranking number 1. Yet everyone else is being thrown around page 2+. Google is inevitably only concerned about Ad spend so this instability of rankings forces you into their ad spending machine.
Organic results in the last few months have been a cesspit and so by the looks of it we are now in a full stream of shit with Google. Ads are scams, organic results are not what they should be due to endless 'algo updates'.
What's the solution? I ponder this daily. Without Google and Facebook targeting, starting a successful, long lasting business just got hard again.
It frustrates me a lot. I don’t even know how to find useful information online anymore for everyday things like “how hot is too hot outside for a cat?” I invariably land on a garbage page with paragraph after paragraph of unintelligible keyword fluff. I keep thinking that one of the paragraphs will have a the content I’m looking for, but more and more I get to the end and realized I just scanned a whole page of referral links and content that was clearly farmed out to be written by someone who either doesn’t know English or GPT2 or something.
But Google are getting money of scams so ...
Maybe this wasn't a real example, but searching exactly this (quotes not included) returned the answer in a knowledge box at the top of the page and the first several organic results had the answer very clearly in the text.
You can see this in the recent Google 2FA threads too, lots of people were quite sure Google is doing this to get their phone numbers. The facts don't line up with that, but who has time for facts? They know they're right, and so do the people upvoting. If you point out the facts a handful of confused people might agree, yeah, what you're saying does seem to match reality, but that's no match for the self-assurance of those who haven't checked at all.
Much of the time you can get a long way on just lots of people believing you, without any basis in reality. But Mother Nature couldn't care less what you believe, and it's tricky for people who think this way to sense where the line will be until they've stepped over it.
Better versions of the (apocryphal) story of King Cnut the Great can get this across. The courtiers pretend to believe their King's claim to command the sea, but the sea of course couldn't give a shit, it's just water, it obeys Mother Nature's laws (in this case Gravity via a fairly circuitous process causes Tides) but not the whims of men.
more and more like (a worse version) of the yellow pages every quarter.
I don't think Google has an interest in keeping those ads. The reputational damage, and adblock installs it drives, must be more than the few clicks those ads make. Pissing off the user (or more likely, whoever helps the user clean up the aftermath) to the point that they install an ad blocker costs all future ad revenue from that person.
But until not just Google, but all the other ad networks, have cleaned up their act to the point where I can safely let my mother browse the Internet without an adblocker, I'm installing an adblocker on every machine I support.
So many bad things come from ads: Scams like this, tech support scams, ads tricking users into installing adware/malware, really attractive looking offers that sell you utter garbage (with promises that it's risk-free since you can return them, except shipping is on you and costs more than the product), resource usage on your computer, tracking/fingerprinting, disgusting imagery of various nasty diseases being shoved in your face ... there are very few benefits ads have to you, and they're vastly outweighed by the risks and costs, especially for users who don't know how to avoid being taken advantage of.
Also, once that person gets voted into office, they immediately have to deal with both lobbyists and members of the deep state that are already in those lobbyists pockets. If you try and go against the will of the state or corporate America (not the people, mind you), the CIA and corporate media will relentlessly smear you and try to demolish your likelihood of re-election. You can also have members of the house of representatives with abysmal approval ratings actively impede legislation with overwhelming public support. Assuming you can somehow overcome these odds, you then have to contend with the fact that you have at most 8 years to achieve what you need to accomplish before likely having the next one in charge try their best to dismantle your accomplishments.
Note: some might find it odd that I consider term limits evidence of the superficial nature of US democracy. It's important to realise the motivation behind the introduction of term limits in the first place was following FDR's 3 re-elections, Republicans were worried that if they did not introduce term limits, they would never get a chance at getting elected again. This is because FDR's policies had overwhelming support of the people - democrats and republicans alike. Of course, what really happened was that future Democrat and Republican presidents lacked the backbone to resist kowtowing to lobbying and corruption but the damage has been done. Anybody seeking to remove term limits would be (and not without some justification) accused of trying to turn themselves a dictator.
Now, I’m sure a Google PR person would insist that this tiny bit of text is a clear and unambiguous visual distinction but they’d be lying to you hoping that you are unfamiliar with eye-tracking research showing how little things like that matter, not to mention the way Google has trained users not to notice by using the smallest icon sizes and progressively removing as many visual indicators over the years as they think they can get away with.
The fact that people at Google feel the need to claim that this is a meaningful distinction tells you that it isn’t. Nobody at Google got defensive about this back when they didn’t offer advertisers a way to get the top result because it was completely obvious that ads were separate.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/squint-and-youll-click-it/
Remember when Google highlighted ads in different colours? Like the garish pink and green from way back in 2001: https://edge45.co.uk/blog/google-adwords-evolution-timeline/ (scroll down to see it near the bottom)
Look at how they intentionally tried to differentiate the ad from the rest of the search results: large swaths of white space separate the top sponsored ads from the rest of the search results even in a time when monitors were smaller, with clearly different link and background colours, etc.
I wonder if anybody's built a browser plugin to provide Google search results pages that look like they used to back in 2001? ;-)
> It’s hard to imagine what Google looked like without ads
...I'm not too sure on that one, Colin. Not a whole lot of imagination required.
(DDG seems to do it the other way around: results have favicons, ads have nothing in that spot. anyways, adblocker back on)
If at some point adblocking is defeated I'm up for a very difficult crash landing into reality.
[0]: almost; top results can be scams of course; but it's rare.
Firefox should just ship uBlock Origin by default and make it the default experience. Brave browser is already doing that.
[0] : https://newpipe.net/ [1] : https://f-droid.org/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ [2] : https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/releases
Mozilla does their best with Firefox Focus (which is also a "Safari Content Blocker"), but you cannot use normal Firefox extensions on iOS, including ad and script blockers.
I was extremely frustrated to buy an iPhone for privacy, only to find that there is no way to selectively block javascript! They only provide a coarse toggle with Safari.
I can't even read most news websites these days because the ads are so utterly distracting and awful.
The lack of functioning ad blocking is by far the biggest downside to iOS, and the same reason that I pity the engineers who put all that work on desktop Safari only to have it rendered worthless by their lack of ad blocking.
I don't think this is true. I use 1Blocker and it seems to have tons of element-based rules. You can also create your own element-based rules easily with the Safari share extension. You tap the element you want to remove, tap buttons to go up or down the DOM to make sure you hit the right level, and then add it to your blocklist.
Still, it works pretty well. But how I wish it was possible to have uBlock Origin running in mobile Safari (and desktop Safari for that matter)...
But in my experience, it simply does not work compared to other platforms. I still see a lot of ads even with their strictest settings, and it also seems to break a lot of sites without having any toggle switches in the browser UI.
It's gotten to the point where I put the iPhone down and pick up another device if I need to access a website. After a few months, I'd like to just resell the phone. But on the social side of things, having a number with blue chat bubbles is a depressingly effective status symbol, and Apple is better about in-app tracking.
It's getting hard to ignore how harmful the duopoly in phone operating systems is to consumers. Carrying two phones around is not a tenable solution.
I use DNSCloak to block ads in other apps. It’s obv not as good as an element blocker but it’s great for when I need to use chrome or some random store app that inserts ads.
And the answer is, it's not installed by default, but there are a variety of third-party plugins available in the App Store.
There is a firehouse of options in the app store, but you need to sift through conflicting reports about which ones are "still good" - the prevailing recommendations seemed to change every 6 months or so when I researched which ones to try.
When you do find some that seem worthwhile, the paid tiers are often expensive, and they will not work as well as the free browser extensions on every other platform.
And there is no replacement for NoScript at any price.
1. Googled “mail forwarding” 2. Must have clicked one of the ads like: https://www.unitedaddressupdate.com 3. Quickly used the autocomplete to fill out all the forms including my credit card information
The brilliant part of this scam is that mail forwarding for a year in the US costs $0.99 so the expectation is you have to pay the USPS so nothing seemed odd… the websites even look almost identical. The show was over when I received a notification from my Chase that they charged $70 instead.
Chase appears to have caught on before Google though because the charge didn’t go through
For some reason, some people in our government believe that the USPS must be run as a business instead of as a service to citizens. This is one of the manifestations of that belief. Selling your personal information so you get flooded with advertisements is one of the most business-like moves I can think of.
It was a bit jarring, I got very far in the process before realizing something was off. Made me realize how much trust I was implicitly putting into my search engine.
Also, while active, I stopped accepting any of their automatic “improvement” suggestions, as they inevitably lead to increase spending, but almost never to better conversion.
If I ever need to advertise with Google again, I’ll probably need to go through an agency and pay quite a bit extra.
I've spent millions on ads with G and Fb and have never even had a real rep.
She googled something like 'mail new social security card' - clicked the first result and started entering information.
About 4 screens in she asked me to look at it - and we could both tell that it was likely not an official gov site at that point.
was first result in google so she trusted it - it looked similar enough to a gov site to go with the easy onboarding flow.. a few details like name and addy - then submit - next screen a few more bits of info.. submit next screen - real gold like maiden name, name of dog, - they already captured the social on the first screen..
some months later the irs is telling her she needs a pin code and that her identity appears to be hacked or whatever.. no surprise.
I long for the day when the faint piss-yellow box surrounded paid listings.. the engineers that came up with that perfect yellow that may show on a good desktop monitor / and in a presentation to the ftc/cpb/congress - whatever.. yet faded out on a laptop screen - and when the sun hits.. and yet as great as that was at being essentially invisible to most users - they still did away it - lets assume because it caused more clicks.. a/b testing and all the s valley bs.
I had forgotten about that incident until I saw this headline - might be time enough to still ad a note about this on a reply to a different HN article a week ago - where someone said "I've never seen any evidence of anyone hurt by the large scale collection of personal data by Google and FB." - ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27064382 )
( Part of the discussion in regards to the article Why I Work on Ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27060898 )
This is indeed another good example of damage done by the ad selling overlords.
Now remembering stopping people from clicking the 'first result' for "flash player" - on so many devices, so many times - that ad was a two click malware install - of course it was a paid ad - sigh - people just don't know and google's been exploiting that for a long time.
I thought it was obvious by now that Google is a money train, and no one is watching the tracks. Their main distinctions as a Fortune 500 company are avoiding human contact and abandoning projects.
And its also not that simple to weed out bad actors when normally the government sites that should rank are probably hopeless and the senior civil servants in charge knowledge of the web is “in need of some improvement”
Google and Bing could turn up the YMYL (“your money or your life” ) knob but they would also need to employ higher paid local people to vet these sorts of ads.
Stricter KYC (Know Your Customer) could be required to run online adverts is another solution.
Pre covid I got pitched a grade 7/6 (v senior O-6 /GS15 ) job for the DWP to sort out the technical seo side. Looking at these scam sites in search would have been a priority had that gone anywhere – maybe set up some meetings with Matt Cutts and discuss a joint us / uk approach.
Maybe I should follow that job up.
It's hard to get traction though when the folks making the decisions feel threatened that a 25 year old is going to be making the same as them and be the same "rank".
I think part of the solution needs to be creating it on a separate scale than GS, similar to an SL or ST position, but geared specifically towards knowledge workers. That's a solution that would probably require congressional involvement though...
But its is a problem your not going to attract many B+ candidates if your so far behind industry.
About 3 years ago one uk org (I wont say which one) tried pitching people on linked in I got the pitch and so did a mate who's ex military he laughed and said "not on those poverty wages"
Never going to get good junior devs at that price point. Don't get me started on security clearance requirements in addition to low wages...
The fix is to provide competitive wages, but the politics of it is difficult.
1. Ban the sites in one way or another.
2. Jail the people who run them, if reachable.
3. Require payment providers to reverse the payments of the last X days once caught.
So how much do you pay for your ability to click on phishing links? Is it $0? Guess Google doesn't have to refund you anything and gets to keep all that money the scammers paid it!
Taking money to put fraudulent ads above legitimate results seems like it's not doing the minimum due diligence to skirt around a willful negligence accusation.
Few things are more profitable than selling both the poison and the cure.
I'm probably not technical enough, but I'm always left wondering how no one created a 'bettergoogle.com' that makes a query to google from the client side and applies an array of filters to google's output, starting by removing the ads and the results from any known bad actors. Could also be a browser extension but that makes it difficult on mobile.
If you consider the cognitive load of people as the limited resource, ad displayers showing ads in their own self-interest are acting against the common good.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/jun/16/once-again-cop...
I think Google has really increased the number of in-search ads recently. It used to be that they were obvious and at the top/side, now they look like regular results and often fill up the whole first page. IMO they know they are dominant enough in the market now that they can get away with providing garbage results for some short term profit, and will just dial it back if viable competitors come along to stop anyone else entering the market.
It took me to https://nino.org.uk/ which claims "All employers and universities in the UK will require you to have this number so apply for your NI Number NOW." That is a total lie - if you don't work during your time as a student you don't need the number at all. You can work without a national insurance number, you just will may pay a higher tax rate until you get your national insurance number when you'll get a refund. It only says all the way at the bottom that they are not affiliated with the government.
Sure, once those find a way around Googles licensing crime against free and open markets built on top of Android and Google Play. Don't have to compete as default search engine provider if hardware providers are prohibited from changing the default.
Unfortunately, it is a problem:
"Why can't Google get a grip on rip-off ads?" : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957
Excerpts from the above article:
> Adverts for unofficial services selling government documents such as travel permits and driving licences are against Google's own rules.
> In the UK, changing the address on your driving licence is free - but Google consistently showed adverts for services charging £49.99.
>Websites like these are not illegal and customers may still get the documents for which they have applied.
>However, some of the companies charge more than five times the amount that the official websites do.
I did report it at the time (and suggest other family members to do the same) but from a numerous list of sponsored results to now see none is a surprise!
The best part was that some websites had two versions, one more aggressive one, and a slightly toned down one. If you didn't have an adblocker, you got the first one. If you did, you got the second one, because apparently the ABP people did draw the line somewhere.
https://i.imgur.com/1OGHbAW.png https://i.imgur.com/4r7PAl7.png
(some slightly NSFW content in these example images:)
https://i.imgur.com/ZF9G7fZ.png https://i.imgur.com/hkkvuXd.png https://i.imgur.com/1N2o3QT.png
uBlock Origin with Firefox is definitely the way to go now: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Google "Vietnam visa government website", and you will see a result from "govt.vn" as the too result. That is not the official web site, but neither Vietnamese NIC nor google didn't find a problem with it.
I used to work for a comparison shopping engine. The traffic was a mix of paid and organic search. We thought about using paid traffic to test page titles and descriptions for organic pages because it's not like users could tell the difference.
Not suggesting these nefarious actors, who rely on ignorance of the consumer, arent a problem
But on a more general level, I don't really have a problem with companies offering to fill out government forms for me in exchange for my money.
For instance last year I fought a traffic ticket by myself. It's not hard, but you do have to fill out like 3 different forms and mail them in. Totally free besides the stamps.
There are many many "ticket fighting" companies which charge you $100 to get you out of a ticket. They act like they're lawyers but really they just fill these forms out for you. If I had to do it again, I'd pay the $100 for the convenience.
How do we decide who is a scam and who is improving the experience of interacting with the government? How much friction do you have to remove before it's OK to charge?
Clearly the mail forwarding ones are a scam (it's super easy through USPS) and, in my opinion, the ticket fighting ones are not a scam. So the line is somewhere in between those two poles.
It's not a scam if the customer is properly informed of the situation.
Shortly after this she started getting additional scam calls/texts too, although this could be entirely unrelated...
This issue isn’t restricted to Google. The only main difference is that Google run their own ad network. In both cases it show how little verification is going on with online ads. If anything I believe the ad networks should be held resonsible for the ads they push to the end user.
"I'm unsure if the competition have solved this problem that I tried and verified they don't have." Just seems like a pretty terrible defense of a big tech company that definitely hasn't solved that problem that they absolutely do have and know it will defraud people.
Remember the old days when google had their ads clearly and obviously marked, off to the side of your search results so as to minimize the potential for confusing ads with results? Yeah they decided there was more money in shaking down people to claim top spot when people specifically search for them. You search for coke, the top result is pepsi if they pay google. Pay google so people get what they search for. Make it more likely to click on the paid ad than the search result for the exact same thing. People getting ripped off is collateral damage, not worth sacrificing shakedown proceeds to avoid actively helping fraud. It stinks to high heaven and Google employees know this.
"We haven't fixed their grift. That fixing it might impact ours is totally unrelated." --Google
There's also a hilarious eBay ad on the side offering driving licence renewals!
The first [1] does say several times that it's not the official site, but they are charging a £57.60 fee for submitting something that can be done on the Government's website for free.
The second [2] is also quite clear that it's unofficial, but the price isn't visible, as trying to use the call to action button results in an error message.
Putting in "renew driving licence official" results in similar ads being shown first.
While it seems these sites aren't doing anything illegal, both they and the search engines are profiting from people that don't know better.
[0] - https://imgur.com/a/bIlcBvG [1] - https://drivinglicenceshelp.co.uk/apply?msclkid=ec0c69ce50b7... [2] - https://drivinglicencerenewalsonline.co.uk/
[1] https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-to-find-your-ein-4768994
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/employer-identification...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employer_Identification_Number
On Bing.com I get https://www.irs-tax-ein-number.com, https://irs.usa-taxid.com, https://ein-gov-online.com/irs-ein/application, and https://www.irs-ein-tax-id.com