Again, Google Ads is being criticized for supposedly promoting a fake version of a cryptocurrency website that directs users to a phishing website copy that is meant to steal their digital assets.
It is said that Google Ads has been used to promote malicious bitcoin websites by showing fake ads in Google’s search results.
BleepingComputer says that threat actors have come up with a way to promote a fake version of Whales Market, an over-the-counter (OTC) cryptocurrency market that lets people trade airdropped tokens.
Cryptocurrency Google Promotes Counterfeit Platforms
It has been found that the version that was hacked is hiding as a paid ad at the top of Google’s search results. Crypto.news’s research shows that, at the time this story was written, Google is indeed promoting the fake Whales Market.
Users are taken to [www.whaels.market] instead of the real [www.whales.market] when they click on it, even though it has what looks like a real domain address on the search results page. BleepingComputer also says that the bad guys have apparently registered a lot of domains that look like Whales Market, with at least one of them, [www.whaless.market], already not being used.
The fake copy looks exactly like the real Whales Market website, which tricks people into joining their digital wallets. Once they do that, though, malicious scripts are run, which drains the victims’ digital banks of cryptocurrency.
This latest incident adds to a string of similar ones in which scammers have used Google’s platform to spread fake schemes. Notably, an unknown hacker tricked investor Mark Cuban into downloading a hacked version of MetaMask, which led to the theft of cryptocurrency worth almost $900,000.
The people behind this new phishing campaign have not been found yet, but Google seems to be taking steps to stop these kinds of scams. At the beginning of April, the company sued Yunfeng Sun and Hongnam Cheung, two people from China, for using the Google Play store to push fake cryptocurrency investments.
The case didn’t name the apps that were being blamed, but Google said that over the past four years, it had taken down 87 fake apps that were said to be made by Sun and Cheung. These apps had gotten nearly 100,000 downloads around the world.
