Bitcoin Forum

Atomic Wallet's phishing website is being promoting in Google's advertisements.
Website:
This is a easy way for scammers to scam people. This is a dangerous position for users due to their ads placement. I can still find their fake website in Google search, which is very dangerous for atomic wallet users. The purpose of the scammers is to take the seed of atomic wallet users and gain access to the account. So before entering any website, you must check the url well. Becareful.  


https://i.ibb.co/QYCZXnC/20200908-021151.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/rZnSZzv/20200908-023740.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/fQd62Gq/20200908-021851.jpg

This is no more a surprise to me again, google search is not the best way to know if a wallet is legit or scam, it is very possible google will bring out fake websites like this during searches. The best is for people to have the correct link to the original website. Scammers are always working to scam, and they can not stop such scam. It is we that need to be careful. But, some people are just so ignorant but still will be scammed by this way. And truly, we need to be very careful.

If you search on Google to find atomic wallet, the first result you will get is this phishing website. Then the newcomers here may think the website is real which can have bad results. I am giving the search result here, you can try it yourself also.

https://i.ibb.co/X8RrLsJ/20200908-032100.jpg

Are ads automatically added to the google first page search? This is not the first time see such a horrible thing happened and it's not fair to call it as an accident. I remember a physhing copy of e-paiements which stayed a long time in top of search page and scammers did really succeed to get users personal data before the company report the issue to google.
Those ads should be manually revised, as we may not think that google is involved in promoting a scam website. 

I googled search it, I was unable to see it, but I know you are right, I searched for their domain, it was exactly what you posted above.
So, this is more than an evidence. This was registered not long ago, it was even today this website was registred, all they could claim is to be real atomic wallet. They are really fake and scam.

The websites/ads you get when you search with Google are definitely not manually filtered to check for malware, phishing links or fake websites, the risk is with whoever is searching and that makes Google a very bad choice, but it's now more terrible when looking up for something as important as a wallet to download and store your funds, you could be importing your wallet with your seed, not knowing you're giving it to scammers.

Even if newbies are using Google search for random things and information, I think when it comes to a wallet or anything that has to do with their funds/money, more caution and carefulness is required, and the official website should be the only point of contact at all times.

Someone already posted it in the Scam Accusations board, [Scam]: Fake Atomic wallet thru Google Ads (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5274028.0).

Search results are ranked based on activity score as well as bid amount. So basically; organic activity (including visits and mentions on other sites) as well as a substantial bid (amount paid to appear higher on search results) determine what website is returned to a user after a search. Google has a poor filter system, so a phishing website can show up on their result page with a substantial bid and activity, which can be faked.
At this point, you shouldn't use Google search engine at all, more so, if you are looking up delicate queries, like wallet websites or exchanges.

That's another url link. Scammers use domain names so subtly. If you don't look at it properly, you can't understand that it is a fake website. I searched before I posted this to see if it had already been posted.

[Scam]: Fake Atomic wallet thru Google Ads (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5274028.0).


And the url of this website. There is a difference here and if you want to catch this difference you have to look carefully.

I hope the atomic wallet team already knows about this scam.

Google cannot do anything until the community reports such scam adverts to them. I have already reported to them with the details provided by OP.

Request you all to do the same by visiting this link - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en and bookmark it for future reports.

Personally I don't find fluidity that Google search has anywhere else (yeah, I know I give data for this 'convenience'), if you are anything like me then best bet would be to use an ad blocker or never ever trust any ad.

Google has been doing this for a while,even they are still promoting scam fake giveaway ads on their famous YouTube platforms so never trust the ad section, better check the search results deeply before downloading anything.Google may tale down this ad when they got enough reports but what could be the permanent solution to this?

I never paid any attention at all to Google Ads, but now I browse them with curiosity to see the fake sites and join the investment club for 250$ type scams that are no longer infrequent to see placed as Ads, especially if searching for anything crypto related. It would be interesting to see some sort of stat on fake sites on Google Ads per industry. I bet crypto is the leading one …

The particular case in the OP has the additional (dis)advantage of also trapping those that type the URL and inadvertely swap a few letters in the process.

I tend to think that Google should at least create some sort of reputational distinguishable visual cue in their Ads, to distinguish between newcomers and consolidated advertisers (i.e. some colour guide on the term "Ad" to hint this, and display information on the Advertiser when clicked or similar).

Same scam with a new skin. If you follow my advice I have often repeated as above, then you will never fall victim to this.

Google do not vet their ads, at all. Scammers regularly pay to have their ads bumped to the top of search results. The solution to this is two fold. First, install uBlock Origin for your browser of choice (it should be Tor or Firefox, but that's another discussion), from the following link: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock. This will block all ads, including these scam ones. It boggles my mind that people still browse the internet without an ad blocker.

Secondly of all, stop using Google. Not only does it try to scam you, but it spies on everything you do and sells your data to anyone and everyone. Good alternatives include DuckDuckGo, SearX, or Qwant.

Fluidity and convenience usually comes at a price, reason why lots of crypto users patronize custodial wallets to avoid taking responsibility. As you said, you trade your data for this convenience, but data is a broad space and ranges from browsing history to really sensitive information which you would not want a third party storing.
Using an ad blocker is very good practice, you could also use Searx to anonymously visit other search engines like Google, and it returns the result to you.

I wonder how can google Ads bots let this webpage being promoted. Another breach in security, bot algorithm, human mistake? It turns out that with money, you can promote everything via google Ads.

Both ads and organic activity are different. You can get your website in top of 1st page if you bid the highest regardless of whatever activity you have in your website while to be ranked in #1 in google search, you have to be very unique and lots of back link etc. Ads have no connection with visits, mentioned as you said above.

First, they are after money. 2nd, they barely have time to check all the advertisers manually. So, yeah you can promote any shit you want to but you can also report any ads you want to.

I am aware of that and I have disabled most of my tracking  — location / web / YouTube activity.


Thanks, I'll give Searx a try.

Don't use google for a searching kind of wallet. Not only atomic but another fake wallet already on google ads, like exodus (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5197078.msg55123034#msg55123034)

https://i.ibb.co/fqXhGGX/1.png

I don't use google anymore. I use duck duck go for searching and there are no ads also, where what I want on the top result.

https://i.ibb.co/562ztdx/12.png https://i.ibb.co/kcqfBpr/13.png

I think it's time to make a single thread for reporting things like this. I've seen multiple threads talking about the same thing, and honestly phising website being advertised by AdSense is not going to disappear, even if it's an old trick.

uBlock sounds interesting and yes it's always prudent to use a trustworthy ad blocker. Although in some cases the Ad Blocker itself could have malware so there's that to be taken into account too. DuckDuckGo is a decent browser but I guess it'll take a while for it to reach the same level of functionality as the more mainstream one. The Brave browser is pretty good though.

Lot of phishing websites are now available on Google, Newbies are at risk as a result of those type of phishing websites. So I agree with you, everyone can easily see the fake / phishing website links in a thread instead of a separate thread. Anyone can open a single thread which will be useful for everyone, Then everyone will be able to report phishing websites in one thread. Due to the market up trend, scammers are using this system extensively for scams. We should warn the newcomers about this scam.

Google are not your friend. They are not there to protect you. They do the bare minimum due diligence on the ads they run and the apps they accept in the app store. All Google cares about is farming your data and making money. If a scammer is willing to pay them, they will happily take their money.

Disabling things like your Google search history or your YouTube activity, or turning up things like your Facebook privacy settings, does next to nothing to protect your privacy. These companies are still monitoring everything you do and collecting all your information, the only difference being now you or your friends/contacts can't see your history. They still can, and they are still selling it to third parties.

That's why you should use an open source ad blocker such as uBlock Origin, which I linked above. It is the only ad blocker you will ever need. Note that "uBlock" is a different program to "uBlock Origin". "uBlock" has commercial interests and should be avoided.

DDG browser is for mobile only. Brave browser is also filled with trackers and ref links and accepts money to show you ads, so helps on neither the "privacy" nor the "avoiding potential scams via ads" fronts.

Steering a bit from the discussion; I never mentioned that there was a connection between ads and visits, I was discussing what goes into results which are returned by search engines after a request, and visits is one of the factors. There are two parts to search results;
• Indexing: For a site to appear on a search page, they need to have been indexed, and this is done when such a site is picked up by web crawlers or "spiders", these are bots used by search engines to scan the web looking for pages which would be relevant to seachers. The site has to be visible to the bots in order to be indexed.

• After a site has been indexed by an engine, the next target (of the site owner) would be to appear on search results, preferably on the first page. This is where factors such as activity or traffic, back links or mentions on other websites, bid amount, SEO~Search Engine Optimization; which includes use of specific key words relevant to the website's services is very useful. This is done so an engine returns the most accurate and relevant result to a particular search query.

The search engine should also have a system to filter the indexed websites and check for suspicious or fake activity, inorder to protect its users, and this is a reason why Google is a bad option to use as a search engine, as they have a poor filter system and do the bare minimum to protect its users.

Finally Google identified the website as fake and phishing. But after so many reports, Google has taken a long time to identify this website as phishing. So it is very risky to use Google to find any kind of wallet now, newbies should be careful about this.

https://i.ibb.co/xj5v7Jr/20200912-151707.jpg

The ads construction or configuration after your research is very deceiving we usually click the first link of our research because in the past you can easily differentiate the search results and the ads, now they are configured to be the same, if you are a newbie that do not check details in URL you will end up a victim of these phishing websites and it's Google ads fault.

I guess no experience trader in the cryptocurrency community that would click a google ads website, It's not surprising anymore at all and it is already discuss a lot here in the forum where google is not filtering scam websites, anybody could make an advertisement of their websites in google as long as they pay.

A trader could easily identify legit websites and either way they have a lot of ways to identify it, they could go to a lot of trusted sources where they could get a legit link of the website like in this forum.


I guess website is already reported a lot of the community to take down this website, either way google is so clever doing this without losing money.

This warning is for newbies. Experienced traders know about this type of phishing, and scammers also know that experienced people will not step into this scam. These scams are designed to scam newbies, where the success rate of scammers is very high. So experienced people will not fall prey to these phishing, so it is not right to think that no one else will fall prey to them. It is our responsibility to warn new community members about such scams as much as possible.