A Really Nasty Ad Slips Past Google | Hacker News Reader

A Really Nasty Ad Slips Past Google

techcrunch.com

102 pointsvaksel25 comments

That's very nasty, indeed.

Why does Google allow advertisers to display a different URL than the one they are sending people to?

They don't. I've typo'd my destination URL and immediately got stopped because it didn't match the display URL. Definitely some trickery afoot.

They certainly do. It's extremely common, and perfectly within their guidelines. That's why they have 2 distinct fields, which are allowed to be on different domains.

One reason is to allow ad-arbitrage, which is a massive part of adwords. (I used to do a fair bit of this).

For example, you might want to show adverts that have the display URL of apple.com but actually go through an ad networks own url before they get there. Having the ad display a URL of an ad-network instead of apple.com would be very silly.

You might also just want to put everything through your own jump script so you can count clicks yourself to ensure google is honest.

From the adwords guidelines:

"Your display URL must accurately reflect the URL of the website you're advertising. It should match the domain of your landing page so that users will know which site they'll be taken to when they click on your ad."

The original ad here violates that requirement.

But certainly allowing a different destination URL to display URL is pretty important for a lot of people who legitimately use adwords to drive traffic through ad-networks or jump scrtips etc.

They may have had a 301 redirect to the real Mozilla website and changed it later, in case a Google employee would check the URL.

it's usually a lot more involved than that, very often even after the site goes live, they still have the redirect in place, only it's limited to the ip range for Mountain View California.

And I wonder: does Google staff its ad division with simpleminded trusting folk who just fell off the turnip truck?

I have a friend who's reported blatant violations of the AdWords policies against (1) sending people to a page full of other ads; and (2) ultimate landing pages on very different domains than displayed.

He's sent screenshots. I can trivially reproduce what he's reported from my home consumer DSL. But then after his report is forwarded around a bit at Google, he just gets the response back, "we don't see that."

Gee, ya think maybe the scammers are identifying Google IPs and sending them what they want to see?

Google even asked him for an outside proxy they could use for testing!

And it's bad for google. Users will learn, don't ever click on an adwords link - in the same way we try and teach them not to click on a 'you are the 1000 visitor' type pop-ups

Apart from the url mismatch, is this illegal? I don't think so, they are selling support for an opensource project. If this support is bad, not needed, ..., is more an ethical problem, but otherwise there is nothing wrong about it.

It may not be illegal, but I'd be shocked if it wasn't a flagrant violation of Google's terms of service and likely to get the advertiser's AdWords account terminated with extreme prejudice.

"Illegal" and "nothing wrong" aren't an exhaustive set.

what do you mean by "extreme prejudice"?

Extreme prejudice doubtlessly means that after Google AdWords finished terminating the scammers AdWords account they will probably also manually adjust their search engine rankings to make sure that they never appear again in any Google search. ;0

Messing with Google will get you totally banned.

Meaning like every other Google account termination, probably...

Yay, obscure idiom time!

The phrase "terminate with prejudice," largely fallen into disuse today, means basically "fire this person and blacklist them from ever working here again". The variant "terminate with extreme prejudice" was popularized by the film Apocalypse Now and is a euphemism of sorts meaning "assassinate".

Basically implying (mostly tongue in cheek) that Google's retribution might go beyond just "terminate their AdWords account".

As far as I can tell, it's something of a grey area. The German c't magazine reported on this type of scam recently. Apparently it's common in Germany, used against users searching for FOSS (OpenOffice, Firefox, etc.) and various freeware.

While charging for support isn't illegal in itself, a few cases have made their way through the courts, with the burned users not having to pay up as it's often not clear what the service you are paying for is even supposed to be. What is of course illegal (at least in Europe, I'd hope elsewhere too) is hiding the fact that they're charging for anything in the first place. The operators have cottoned on to this and will hide any mention of cost or a contract when you visit the page via a search engine or ad (based on the Referer [sic] header), but if you go back to the page directly after signing up or receiving a bill, it's all there. Obviously, they're trying to make you think you missed it first time around.

I suspect there is in theory also legal ground to fight this based on trademark, etc. grounds, but there's probably almost zero chance of real success, as it's way too easy to open a throwaway business that closes down the first sign of trouble.

The way to get at these guys is presumably proving them guilty of a criminal offence (fraud), in which case the business front won't help.

If you end up a victim of this sort of scam, basically categorically state (in writing) that you weren't aware you were agreeing to a contract, and that the contract is therefore void. Also, don't give them more info on you than they already have. If they send the bill by email and they don't have your physical address, don't send the refusal to pay in the mail with a return address, etc. They'll rarely try to hunt you down if you flat out refuse, there are unfortunately enough victims that will cough up as soon as they get a scary sounding letter with a legal-looking letterhead.

It's especially common in Germany because of some odd laws about debt collecting. I don't remember the details but somehow it's a offense for YOU not to respond to their demand for money. Most people pay up because having a judgement against you screws up your credit rating.

The only thing here that's illegal is using mozilla's trademarks without their permission.

They seem to have mostly avoided that, actually. There's no Firefox logo on their site, for example.

The url shown in google is a gross violation.

Mozilla could easily sue them for that alone.

This is what "Trademark" is all about, for once: preventing consumers from being misled.

Legality questions aside, it is certainly really bad for any user running into this. The download that the user actually gets after giving away their credit card info is an ancient version of the Mozilla Suite, not even Firefox. The support is pretty much non-existent as well. People can't actually get the help they paid for.

I caught this a few weeks ago when I tried to install ffx on my girlfriend's dad's laptop. Something smelled funny and I backed out without thinking much of it. Never saw the $2.50 charge though. I've reported malicious ads to google in the past and they took them down. Though that was for obscure electronics not a major browser. I bet this is gone in less than 12 hours.

Less - it's gone for me already.

weirdly the url mentioned http://firefox.mozilla-now.com/ now goes to FileHippo's AVG Download page

I don't think whoever owns the domain and is running the ad compaign is actually the firefox support guys. If you take a look at the source it appears they're loading sites in a frameset. So my guess is it's a referrer shop and the site they're loading will change regularly.

And I don't know why I'm saying they or shop since it's no doubt one guy collecting many small referral paychecks for a bunch of these.

This happened before, when Google Adsense paid $1 for anyone who installed Firefox with Google Toolbar via an affiliate link. A clever chap ran ads linking to a download page with his affiliate link.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com