Did you know that scammers may use Google Ads to target a company and its customers? Anyone may purchase and advertise for any term on Google Search. You select a keyword and pay to have it appear at the top of the results page. Scammers do the same thing. When a customer/user searches for a specific branded term, they buy and serve advertisements at the top of Google results. When people click these adverts, they are on fraudulent or phishing websites. Some websites send visitors to target brand phishing pages, while others may route them to complex frauds by urging them to phone a phony customer service number.

These phishing websites deceive visitors into disclosing critical information, including login passwords, account information, and personally-identifying information (PII). Bogus customer service websites urge customers to contact a fake customer service number and complete their fraud. Keep all these fraud sites away by using google ads click fraud prevention.

Safeguards:

Regarding individuals:

1. Once the domain is on the site, double-check it.
2. The advertisement domain will be valid, but you may get let to a similar site once accessing it.
3. Examine URLs for similarities or typographical problems. Check to see if the domain is valid for the brand.

Regarding brands:

1. Must have regular monitoring of similar domain registrations for google ads click fraud prevention. Such domains can then get utilized in fraud operations, including search engine advertisements or other schemes. Previously, attackers frequently used spam emails to advertise their rogue websites.
2. Recent trends show that some attackers are attempting to enhance the reach of their fraudulent efforts by purchasing advertising or tampering with the search engine ranking algorithm.
3. Regularly check search engine results for brand and industry-related terms.

Increase your monitoring for domain registrations similar to your brand, and give constant surveillance across search engines to spot misleading results from fraudulent advertising that are equal to your brand. 

Few Scamming methods:

Scamming from specific user flow:

This type of traffic hijacking is a sophisticated and presumably successful strategy for some issues and abuses connected with ad placement vs. organic search results. In this campaign, the top searches for malware-laden advertising were:

• Youtube
• Facebook
• Amazon
• Walmart

Victims just attempted to visit these sites and used Google to direct them there. Instead, they got a bothersome browser hijacker that aimed to scam them.

Cloaking and other offenses:

Cloaking is a method used to divert traffic for nefarious reasons, and it depends on two prerequisites:

• You will be routed to the requested page if the user seems incorrect.
• Redirections to another site and content look to be valid.

“Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines since it provides our users with different results than they expected,” according to Google. Again, a buyer who uses a creative (ad) that contains malware may be banned for at least three months owing to a violation of Google’s policy.

Redirections and traffic:

A short series of redirections leads to the browser locker. In this part, we will disable another harmful ad on Facebook. Of course, the ad is deceptive because there is no indication clicking on it would take you to a website different than the one requested. Note how it displays before the first organic search result, which ensures a better CTR.