The advertising watchdog has launched a tool to tackle online scam adverts – and one of its partners is Google, one of the main offenders.
GoogleAds makes a mint by running plugs placed by scammers aimed at fleecing savers.
I’ve heard from one poor chap who invested £85,000 thanks to a GoogleAd for CrownCompare.co.uk that promised returns of 11% and “100% guaranteed protection” and directed him to AxaGB.com.
Unbeknown to the investor, a 45-year-old London underground train driver, this was a clone website designed to look like it was part of the giant AXA Insurance group.
Now AxaGB.com has disappeared along with CrownCompare.co.uk and his savings.
The Advertising Standards Authority says its new Scam Ad Alert will mean the public can report online scam ads and get them taken down across multiple platforms.
“The overwhelming majority of ads responsibly inform and entertain their audience, but a small minority are published with criminal intent,” said Guy Parker, ASA chief executive.
“Our Scam Ad Alert system will play an important part in helping detect and disrupt these types of scams. By working closely with our partners such as Google and Facebook we can act quickly to have problem ads taken down as part of our ongoing work to better protect consumers online.”
Google says that it already takes down more than 10 million “bad ads” every day.
That gives an indication of the amount of the money it is making from advertisers.
Take Hunterlyinvest.com, which I saw being plugged by GoogleAds this week, promising savers 100% capital protection and returns of up to 20%.
It gave no business contact details, which alone should be grounds for not running the ad.
There were no terms and conditions and a testimonial mentioned someone crowing about how his investment had grown in the past three years even though Hunterlyinvest.com was only registered last month.
"Get in touch with our financial experts to know the best fixed bond option for you," it urged, while admitting lower down the page in much smaller type that it is not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority to give investment advice.
There’s an obvious flaw in expecting the public to police adverts like this – they are the very people that the scammers set out to deceive and victimise.
Another partner in the new venture is Facebook, also no stranger to profiting from scam adverts. It carried so many that fraudulent investment ads that wrongly claimed to be backed by Martin Lewis that the founder of MoneySavingExpert.com sued the social media giant.
He called the new initiative far from perfect.
"Scammers are swift and clever," he said here. "When you try to stop an ad, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole – as soon as it's taken down, they resurface it in a slightly different variant and the whole dance starts again. That means the reporting process needs to be seamless and pacey."
It would be better if Google and Facebook used some of their enormous advertising revenue to fund a vetting process that would filter out the scams before they’re posted in the first place.
Until that happens, they will continue to destroy whatever reputation they has as a source of reliable information. Until that happens, the advice from people like me will be this: never use Google or Facebook when searching for any sort of financial product.
