Google appears to be taking money from fraudsters and facilitating crypto scams. These are the findings from DeFiLlama researcher “0xngmi,” who reported that scammers are buying ads for proper crypto websites on Google, but…

When users click on them, “they get sent to an ad network to track the click, but that network redirects to a scam site instead!”

There’s a new crypto scam on google

Scammers will buy an ad for a proper crypto website on google, with the proper URL

Then when users click on it they get sent to an ad network (https://t.co/k5azsHhC2s) to track the click, but that network redirects to a scam site instead! pic.twitter.com/YEUYqc9IUk

— 0xngmi (@0xngmi) August 23, 2023

DeFiLlama Domain Redirect

They said it was happening with the defillama.com domain name, which was being redirected to a scam domain.

“By using ad networks that are either malicious or compromised, they can switch the URLs,” they added.

“We’ve already reported the ad and the ad network to Google multiple times over multiple days, but Google has failed to take any action,” said the researcher.

However, when CryptoPotato tried to replicate the issue, the genuine website came up, so Google may have removed the offending ad.

‘ChainLinkGod’ said the search giant should be held accountable:

“Blows my mind how Google is not held liable for this given they profit every time an phishing link ad is clicked, they have zero incentive to fix this,”

Google Search ad phishing has also been reported by ‘Scam Sniffer,’ which revealed that a victim lost $900,000 by clicking a malicious Celer Bridge ad on Google this week.

It was another “sponsored” link that had paid Google to be there, only to redirect victims to a malicious