A little bird inside Google told me today that Google is having a new problem with pornographers gaming the system costing advertisers and, in theory, Google, what is coming to Hundreds of Millions of Dollars. He told me that they have been having issues with a new scam in which scammers are signing up to Blogspot (owned by Google) to create new pages that use keywords for products that demand a high price.
He sent me a list of Facebook groups to join and within 10 seconds, someone was posting and trying to get me to go to their new Blogspot page where Google ads were being promoted by porn.
These scammers will then create hundreds of thousands of new “blogs” with these keywords, then promote the scams via Facebook spam with pornographic images. The purpose of these images is to get people to click on them, then go to the page which is promoting advertising for Education or other high cost-per-click advertising – and in the case when I looked at the site, high retargeting campaigns from one of my clients.
But that’s not the worst: in many cases they have found ways to embed pornographic videos which force click the google ads when clicked on and send the visitor to the advertiser’s webpage and charge them for that advertising.
The source said that Google is unable to keep up with the insane amount of offshore scammers in China and Vietnam who are creating thousands of these new pages a day. Even if each page only scams Google out of $10 per page, per day, the amount, according to the source, is now costing advertisers at least $200 Million a year in fraud (according to the source) from what is complex scam rings that are paying people to create these pages in bulk for only dollars a day.
What do you think about this?
