Pay attention to this ad campaign by Google words perpetrated by cybercriminals and orchestrated to steal credentials. An example of how online scams are perfected today.
Organized hackers have launched a fake ad campaign on Google, supplanting the identity of the customer services of companies like eBay, Amazon or Paypal in order to deceive mobile device users. Thus, Internet users who type in Google keywords such as “Amazon technical support” in English will be led to advertisements whose information refers to a fraudulent phone number.
This digital scam that is passed in a very successful way by conventional Google Adwords ads leads unsuspecting victims to call a switchboard from which they are deceived – and their personal data, put in danger. Cybercriminals even emulate security checks-asking the IP address-to gain the trust of unsuspecting users, and through a series of questions and answers begin to extract sensitive information.
The main hook of the scam is none other than a supposed gift on the Google Play platform as a discount voucher for the inconvenience caused. In order to obtain the hypothetical entry in your Google account, the victims must provide their credentials to the false call center, which also finds out about their geographical area. For the moment, the campaign has been detected exclusively for searches in English in Anglo-Saxon countries and Google has already been notified of fraud, withdrawing the ads.
Although these specific campaigns have been eliminated, they constitute a significant example of what we can come across in the network: increasingly sophisticated and credible scams that should lead us to maximize our security efforts and protect all our devices, which are increasingly vulnerable to the Internet of Things. From Panda Security remember that before the discovery of an ad of such characteristics can report it on the official page that has enabled Google, which you can find by clicking on the following link.