Incredibly ironic that this is headlined by Google since they perpetuate most online scams through SEO and AdWords, where they refuse to investigate too deeply since it would negatively impact their quarterly financials.
The thing with Google is, the search-based model for information finding itself is indeed what enables this but it's what enables the Internet itself. There is no index-based search engine that wouldn't be actively gamed by scammers. Scamming is so profitable that one can say 99% of the Internet "by flow" is fraud. And this results in Google being both the enabler of and the wall that stands against scamming. Any purely algorithmic approach to indexing obviously would be taken over. The problem of gaming scammers would exist whether you had Google or a competitive group of search engines. And this situation makes concentration natural since the engine that invests most in finding quality will return it most and so it will be preferred by consumers.
And yes, Google itself is degenerating. I'm not sure what the solution is. The Internet has incubated such an economy for fraud, I imagine waking up and the whole thing will hacked.
This seems like a new initiative between Google and the CSN to stop people from falling from scams that YouTubers like Kitboga[0] and Jim Browning[1] like to expose.
This is a nice step for Google to promote scam awareness, but it shifts the responsibility to the victims.
Google has an enormous role in enabling fraud and malware. They reap huge profits from malicious advertising and it's been a problem for more than a decade. Just about any fraud gets a good amount of exposure before a takedown.
Google should do much more than slap their name on a campaign and tell users to take care.
The much I dislike the G company they do a good job of highlighting how to make spotting a scam easy…it feels like first order principles to me…though it's a problem for many not so "internet natives".
They should really add a warning here not to use Google for this unless they have an adblocker installed.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/phishing-for-crypto-half-a...
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-search...