Google searches are delivering Australians into the arms of fraudsters, as websites and advertisements belonging to scammers are prominently served up to users on the world’s most popular search engine.

In some instances, Google searches provide some scam victims false reassurance that they are investing in legitimate companies.

Once they’ve lost their money, scam victims searching for help on Google are then being shown ads that direct them to a new set of criminals, known as recovery scammers, who claim they can retrieve people’s lost money for a fee, but instead disappear with the cash.

The findings are part of a months-long investigation into how investment scammers use some of the world’s biggest tech companies to find victims.

This masthead found that Google presents scam sites to users, even after those scams were the subject of explicit government warnings.

One example is the scam platform Bitcoin Evolution, which was blacklisted by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority in 2020. In March, Australian authorities placed it on an investor alert list, declaring it “not to be trusted”.

But this month, when this masthead used Google to search for Bitcoin Evolution, the first result that came up was not an official notification, but two Bitcoin Evolution scam websites.

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Registering a phone number with one of the websites resulted in a near-immediate call from a scammer. Invest just $300 and make daily profits of 10 to 15 per cent, the fraudster promised.

“I don’t want you to expect that tomorrow you’re going to buy a new house, for sure not, it’s making only $2000 [or] $3000 by the end of the month,” said the conman.

“The whole idea is that you don’t need to spend time on a mobile computer, and you can check your account once a day, once a week, once a month.”

Fleeced of $700,000

Based on a Google search alone, it can be difficult for Australians to tell if potential investment companies are real or a scam. Results are sometimes muddied by the presence of scam platforms, fake reviews and fake news articles or blogs promoting scams.

Swav, a Melbourne man who didn’t want to use his last name for privacy reasons, was connected to overseas criminals through an advertisement that appeared on his Facebook feed in spring 2020.

Although he didn’t realise it at the time, the celebrities who appeared in the ad providing endorsements were fakes, computer-modified replicas of the famous person.

This masthead revealed on Saturday that Meta, owner of Facebook, takes money for these “celeb-bait” scam ads, despite the ads promoting notorious fraudulent investment platforms and coming from accounts that were clearly not legitimate investment companies.

Swav was just one day into the con, and had only handed over $1500, when he noticed a contradiction in the scammer’s sales pitch. It piqued his suspicion, and when he hung up, he began doing a bit more research.

“I started to search intensively about this company to verify if they are legit,” he recalled. “I searched on Google … but most of the reviews were positive.”

Over the following nine months, the fraudster from a platform called StocksCM stole close to $700,000 from him.

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This masthead tested Google results based on searches for 100 entities recently added to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission’s (ASIC) investor alert list.

The list includes the names of known scam platforms and businesses targeting Australian consumers without holding the appropriate licences.

It showed that Google was failing to block websites for even these publicised rorts.

In the first page of results, Google returned 101 links to websites for platforms using the same names as the blacklisted entities.

The search results also featured 10 Google ads directly promoting scam brands named in ASIC’s warning list.

Google was accepting money to run ads for the Immediate Connect, Immediate Edge and Immediate Vortex scam platforms, all on ASIC’s alert list.

Ten out of the top 14 Google results that appeared in a search for “Immediate Connect” were likely scam platforms, including the top four results, which were all sponsored links for the scam.

“Ready to start your journey? Immediate Connect gives you access to worldwide markets. Invest with confidence and safety,” says the website linked to one of the scam ads, which appeared as the top search result for Immediate Connect.

Landing pages like this are typically not run by the scammers themselves, according to investigators and criminal insiders, but by groups known as “affiliate marketers”, which specialise in creating advertisements and websites that collect the details of potential victims, and then sell them to scamming syndicates.

Google’s ad library shows that the advertiser behind the Immediate Connect ad, registered to the UK, was behind at least another eight ads being shown to Australian Google users, and about 200 Google ads worldwide. They included similar advertisements targeting Google users in Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Canada, Austria, France, Spain, Poland and other countries.

After being contacted by this masthead, Google said it was running checks on the advertiser and would take action in accordance with its policies including removing ads.

Google said that since 2022 it had required advertisers showing financial services ads to Australians to demonstrate they are licensed by ASIC. The company also said it referred to ASIC’s investor alert list, and would check the ads this masthead identified.

“Google has strict policies that govern the kind of ads that we allow on our platform, and ads that intend to mislead or deceive users are a violation of those policies,” a Google spokesperson said.

“We are currently working with NASC [the National Anti-Scam Centre] and other stakeholders on some enhanced measures to combat scams.”

Dan Halpin, whose company Cybertrace specialises in cyber fraud investigations, issued a warning about the Immediate Edge scam and other scams with similar names in October last year.

He said it was very concerning that Google ads were still promoting well-known scam platforms.

“It appears that there’s no due diligence in the scam risk space by Google, otherwise … surely these ads wouldn’t be being posted to Google,” he said.

“It’s really easy to run these websites through scam-detector software and identify that they’re high-risk, and [then] there’s the fact that these companies are also listed on government alert websites saying they are scams.”

The National Anti-Scam Centre said it had received reports people have been connected with scammers after clicking on a Google ad.

The government agency also warned of rising instances of recovery scammers deceptively promising to retrieve money scammed from Australians, or to track down lost cryptocurrency.

In the six months to May this year, Scamwatch received 158 reports of scams with a “money recovery element”.

Criminals often posed as a government agency, cybersecurity organisation, fund recovery service, lawyer, consumer advocacy group or charity.

In some cases, victims were connected to these criminals through social media advertisements or “from searching the web”, the National Anti-Scam Centre cautioned.

“Unfortunately, we hear about this all too often,” Halpin says. “You type in ‘recover Bitcoin’, or whatever your keywords are, and all of a sudden, you are just smashed with all these companies offering guaranteed returns, claiming that in the last month they’ve recovered $5 million, and all these other lies.”

Ken Gamble, executive chairman of cybercrime investigation firm IFW Global, said he had also detected a trend in criminal gangs advertising fake fixed-term deposits on Google and Instagram. The scammers, impersonating bank staff, attract victims by offering better returns on people’s investment.

“They get you to fill out forms. And they go through this whole process where they vet you … then you roll your money over into a term deposit and with [a bank], and your money gets put into an account … Then all of a sudden it’s gone. It’s a scam,” Gamble said.

Google put on notice

Australians lost about $2.7 billion to scams last year. The National Anti-Scam Centre said the losses highlighted the importance of the federal government’s planned scam reforms.

The new laws are set to put banks, telcos and digital platforms, including Google and Meta, on the hook for compensation to victims if they don’t meet the obligations of new mandatory scam codes.

In an October submission, Google argued the draft legislation would have intended consequences, including the removal of the legitimate content of businesses.

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Google argued: “Under the proposed framework, it would be straightforward for a business to target its competitors with illegitimate complaints, leading to the removal (even if only temporary) of the competitor’s legitimate content. The removal of ads or account suspension for a small business, even for a short period of time, can have a significant impact on their revenue and operations.”

Last year, Google’s global advertising revenue, which includes money from clicks on ads, rose by almost 6 per cent to almost US$238 billion (about $365 billion).

Over the same period, Google said it had blocked or removed more than 5.5 billion ads, and suspended 12.7 million advertiser accounts.

Simon Smith, a cybersecurity expert with Scam Assist, said many of his clients who had lost their savings were originally connected to scammers by Google ads, including through fraudulent AI auto-trading platforms.

He said the public had high levels of trust in Google, and many assumed that the results served up first would be most relevant to them.

“The fact that you can pay your money to have a scam ad is just, in itself, unbelievable,” he said.

Scam victim Swav borrowed from his parents and friends to invest in the fraudulent trading platform. He had been tricked into believing he was making millions in profit.

In the past few years, the telecommunications technician has paid back the loans, but said he hadn’t seen a cent of what was stolen from him. He also said he hadn’t received any substantive response to his cybercrime report.

“I can’t even trust Google. I can’t even trust Facebook. I can’t trust someone calling me to propose something … So, yeah, this has changed me a lot.”

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