A fake ad served by Google led users searching for Amazon to a scam website just a day before the big shopping occasion of Black Friday. “Some Google users searching for “Amazon” on Thanksgiving were shown a phony ad that redirected to a scam website, one day before the biggest shopping day of the year,” CBS News reported late on 24 November.
The advertisement was seen on the top of Google’s search results for a long time on the 23rd of November. The ad was removed as it was against Google’s policies and a Google representative said “This was an abuse of our platform. We strictly prohibit advertising of illegal activity and have removed these ads and suspended the account.”
The service which led users to the scam site claimed that they work for Microsoft by using their support number and asked for $150 to remove a virus from the computer that didn’t even exist. Users may have fallen for the scam and could have put their important personal information such as credit card numbers and bank details.
Such incidents have become very popular and the scammers tend to win on most of the occasions due to ideas they use to do such acts.