A big trend among scammers as of late is abusing google AdSense to put their scam sites in sponsored google results. These accounts are hard for the scammers to get, it takes scammers about a month to replace them. Many of the sites that these scams lead to are hard to detect as scams without calling them, and they are often localized and targeted to mobile devices to prevent them from being uncovered. Because of this, we need everyone to help us hunt them. If you can spend 15 minutes searching on your phone or pc for the search terms listed, or others in the same vein, we can do massive damage. We need the whole community, so please share this post and find as many as you can over the next two days. If we concentrate our efforts, we won’t waste energy finding ones that have already been reported. If this campaign is successful, I will call on you again after the scammers have had enough time to get new accounts.
Here are the search terms to try:
Printer support phone number, Mcafee support phone numbers, norton support phone number, Antivirus support phone number, Microsoft support phone number, Apple support helpline phone number, Apple phone number, Printer setup website, Geeksquad support phone number
When you find one of these scams, you should:
Copy the url the sponsored listing leads to. (and write it down)
Click the three dots to the right of the listing.
Take a screenshot of the advertiser info.
Write down the scam number on the page.
Record your call with the scammer or write down the time you called and why it was fraudulent. (Eg. They claimed work for Microsoft, They are impersonating Geeksquad)
Send this information to me in a direct message (not a reply) and send the search term. Send one message per case so it is easier for me to manage.
About 12 months ago I picked up about 8 numbers via cell/mobile phone from Google searches for Fakebook support and also Amazon support. You are correct they only appeared via that method of searching, nothing showed up with a tablet or PC search for the same thing.
It became apparent with that limited info they had large consecutive blocks of toll free numbers which my system then quickly discovered over 250 active numbers to their inbound system.
Infiltrating their network and phone dialing system revealed they had over 1300 active toll free and almost 100 toll area code numbers they were alternating every hour into the Google AdSense searches.
They were completely destroyed as quickly as possible due to the sheer volume of inbound calls from victims we fielded and warned them they were not speaking to Amazon or Facebook. There was hundreds a day and becoming impossible to manage all the inbound call traffic.
It was a very large network of very large call centers at the time, with some having more than 60 scammers taking inbound calls.
Even though that was destroyed from the inside and shut down, it remains just a memory now, the sad part is all the evidence of their operation was supplied to law enforcement, both locally in the US and in India. None of them gave a damn as is typical. Google are only interested in the ad revenue and couldn’t care less. The two dozen host teclos also refused to take action, as did the company hosting their dialing system.
That particular scam operation ended but they don’t walk away from easy money.
I would bet any money they are amongst the massive networks currently running popup scams every day, which has by far and away been the most prolific amount of numbers since late last year. Before then refund scam numbers were in their hundreds and sometimes thousands every day.
I’ve found several hundred active numbers daily in recent weeks used by some of these popup tech support operations. They have turned over large chunks of number real estate and after 4-6 weeks ends up being a continuous block of close to 1000 toll free numbers.
They have extensive resources available in the criminal world in free to operate Facebook/Meta, Instagram and other social media platform groups and that’s a real worry.
When bureaucratic agencies responsible to stay on top of this sort of thing refuse to play their part in prevention, it becomes a real eye opening situation which should never occur.
I don’t need to perform online searches to find numbers but if I come across anything like this again, I’d love to see that extremely shady operation with the big G operating with intent on destroying civil liberties and free western society be brought crashing to earth with a sudden thud.
Nerdshop and 247techies are top on the list when it comes to abuse google search , they are active since 4-5 years and many members posted about them during this time… but nothing happened they are still active everyday
We probably can’t kill the whole thing, but getting the accounts banned can take a center down until they figure out a new way to get leads. This is probably the most valuable and difficult to replace infrastructure for most call centers using it. You could nuke their sip account, pcs, and whatever else, but normally they are back in a day. This is far more impactful.
I’ve used this method exclusively for grabbing fresh Amazon Prime scammers daily the last year simply by searching Google after 10 AM EST for the terms amazon/mytv code which is looking for people trying to activate their prime video and of course always ends up in a RDP session with the 'secure server." The first six months of finding these AdSense ads via the method above I took diligence to report every ad to Google as phishing / fraud and eventually came to the conclusion that Google simple do. not. care. It’s a money maker for them and they’ll continue to take these kinds of obviously fraudulent campaigns until it’s no longer profitable.
I’ve often wondered, hypothetically, if it would be possible to create rotating IPs to hit these clearly-fake ads to keep real people from seeing them? They tend to run out once a certain number of clicks have been converted.
Last point, it’s crazy to me how many of the ads I looked up in the first six months literally listed that they were owned by contacts in India. Weirdly to me, quite a few were also listed as being owned by companies in Hong Kong.
Right now we are working with a company outside of google and using that company to put pressure on google. Its a unique opportunity to do more damage where we couldn’t before. I’d tremendously appreciate if you could send a couple ads over .
We are working with a company outside of google to get them banned and mount pressure, this is a unique opportunity. Please send some ads my way and lets see if we can’t move the needle!
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