[fckgw]

I've noticed on some scam forums and subreddits I frequent that scammers have been using target site's own support searches to redirect users to scam phone numbers.

On both Ticketmaster and Facebook, and many other sites, when you perform a search on their support site it spits back your query in big letters at the top of the page. If you craft the correct search and then buy Google Ads pretending to be Ticketmaster, then you can redirect users to your call center and scam them. And because they link for your ad actually links to Ticketmaster the ad passes validation and appears to be a legit link in the eyes of Google.

Example of a crafted search term: https://help.ticketmaster.com/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93...

[lifeisstillgood]

So, I craft a search where the search query is “call 1 800 scam”, then I buy a google ad with key word of “ticketmaster help”, the ad links to real ticketmaster with my query, and google shows that ad to someone having trouble and hey presto they call my scam line at 4 quid a minute from their mobile?

Yuck all round. I mean ticketmaster is just a sin eater for greedy popstars but yuck ..

[jancsika]

> Yuck all round.

Yes, but also it's an impressive digital Jedi mind trick on a website.

signs a question mark with hand

"This is the support number you're looking for."

And the victim is extra primed here because so many companies make it nearly impossible to talk to a human. Yikes!

Almost seems like there's room here for a grey hat to come in and use this trick to do a good faith job trying to help the customer through their problem. Then tell them at the end that a recent anti-trust suit requires them to tell the customer about alternate independent venues in their area where they can support live music.

[inetknght]

> Then tell them at the end that a recent anti-trust suit requires them to...

Bonus points if you point to the actual anti-trust suit!

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

[potholereseller]

> Almost seems like there's room here for a grey hat to come in and ...

... call the scam numbers to tie up their staff and prevent them from talking to potential victims. Someone like Kitboga could do this at scale. Where there's a phone number, there's a way.

[fckgw]

Exactly. And when you try and help these people and explain that you didn't actually call Ticketmaster support they will tell you that they found the phone number on the official Ticketmaster website and Google said it was a verified link.

Here's a real example from the same thing happening on FB (don't call that number) https://i.redd.it/w9htjqflgjle1.jpeg

[ninkendo]

Completely unrelated tangent: Jesus Christ Reddit is such a cesspit.

Tried tapping that link on mobile, got a screen to view the corresponding post. Tapped it, and I got taken to the App Store. No thanks, force quit the App Store and go back.

Now I get a full screen notice on the original Reddit tab saying “didn’t go where you expected? Next time try the long press!” With instructions to not use private browsing and to long press any link and open in safari. (Wha? You, Reddit, are what are trying to force me to use your app!)

So I long press like they say, open in new tab, and what do I see? A large blank page that just says “REDDIT” in all caps, with the button “Get the app” on the bottom. The link was just to “reddit.app.link” the whole time.

Can’t a company who has a website, just … let me use the website? At every possible turn, Reddit HATES anyone using Reddit from a browser. They will ruin every single aspect of the website they possibly can to try to push you to the app. The entirety of reddit.com seems to be just a broken honeypot to get you to use the app instead. I just can’t fathom how a company can be that broken.

Just delete the Reddit website, it would make more sense.

[KronisLV]

> The entirety of redit.com seems to be just a broken honeypot to get you to use the app instead. I just can’t fathom how a company can be that broken.

It's their intention to have the website be a funnel so that they can get more mobile users.

I sometimes use https://old.reddit.com, though it doesn't look that great on mobile, maybe there are some other alternatives.

[pjc50]

I still don't understand why mobile users are so much more valuable to them, is it just the inability to block ads?

[sizzle]

Your phone has sensors and superior data they can track/sell

[swarnie]

I know reddit will connect accounts together based on device ID, i wonder if their data becomes more valuable if you can tie multiple independent accounts together in to one profile?

Its a site where users will often have multiple login for different subjects of discussion.

[razakel]

>is it just the inability to block ads?

Of course it is.

[inejge]

> Tried tapping that link on mobile, got a screen to view the corresponding post. Tapped it, and I got taken to the App Store.

It's obnoxious, but if you really want to view the post you can switch the screenshot page to desktop mode, and the "View post" button shouldn't redirect to the App Store. The result isn't pretty but it's readable in a pinch.

(They're still not desperate enough to track the UA and detect the switch.)

[tim333]

Using Reddit on the laptop seems ok if you set it to the old version.

All websites seem to freak out over you not getting their damn app if you visit on a phone. I just don't use the phone for browsing if I can help it.

[foobahhhhh]

Hah. I'd make tbe text:

    search all of your friends and connections". You may have lost access to your friends and family. To fix this you need to call ....

[acomjean]

I used to rely on google filtering when searching for sites. Then on the google search page I fell for an add.

I caught it right after I tried to log in (one of the few sites I remember the password and didn’t have it in a manager). Reset password.

Man did I feel dumb.

I searched the financial institution a few times and the fake ad came up a bunch. I reported but the trust has been broken.

[albertgoeswoof]

But why does google allow unverified owners of a domain to buy ads for it? Surely only ticketmaster or agencies approved by ticket master should be allowed to do this?

[progbits]

Because most of the ads are created by external ad agencies, and the people involved are not competent enough to do any verification.

Source: I've also thought this was ridiculous and asked someone working on the adsense team. Apparently tried enforcing some domain verification mechanism in an experiment, but most companies and agencies struggled to get the verification done and of course the $ metrics on this launch dropped, causing execs to force them to stop.

[simonw]

Maybe a partial solution here would be to offer some kind of "domain locking" option?

Allow sites that are heavy targets of this kind of scam - like ticketmaster - to add a "AdSense: locked" line to their robots.txt (or similar) - if that line is present then advertisers have to go through an additional domain verification step in order to place an ad.

[stevenjgarner]

I like this idea. I would love to hear from Google why they would not do this. Anyone know why Google / Facebook et al would not want to do this?

[sceptic123]

Money

[fckgw]

Not necessarily, if you have an affiliate program or something like that you could buy ads for, say, eBay using your affiliate link in the hopes of you generating more profit than the ads cost.

[superb_dev]

There are also still plenty of businesses with a Facebook page as their homepage

[charlieyu1]

There was a time when you search for WhatsApp in Google the first sponsored result is a scam site

[fckgw]

If you search for "HP Support" or "Dell Phone Number" you will get a scam site 50% of the time now.

[netsharc]

One time an article about Facebook logins got to #1 and its comments were full of people mad that Facebook changed their website yet again, how can they login to Facebook, waah, waah!

[amelius]

On top of that, you receive private information about people from Google, because if someone calls your number, then you know that they were on ticketmaster. Replace ticketmaster by e.g. a swingers club, and now Google's ad businessmodel is in real trouble because it leaks sensitive information.

[nothrabannosir]

> ticketmaster is just a sin eater for greedy popstars

Apparently Live Nation owns many performance venues and leverages their power in that market to gain an advantage in the ticket sales market. “Sell through us or you won’t be allowed to play at any famous venue in this city” kind of deal.

Don’t have any sources beyond “heard it on a podcast” though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Cyphase]

I've been seeing similar scams via PayPal. The scammers apparently add the target email address as a forwarding address on a compromised or created-for-purpose email account. And that bouncer email address is signed up for PayPal. So the scam email is actually from PayPal, bounced through some other inbox. The To name and address is of the bouncer email address PayPal sent it to.

One version involves sending money to someone with the PayPal account (so the target might think it was sent from their own account) with a "note" to the transaction recipient, which the target sees, which says PayPal has detected unusual activity and please call this phone number to request a refund.

Another involves a "Your ITEM NAME order is on its way" email where the item being ordered is called something like, "Some Company, Inc: Don't recognize the seller? Call us at SOME PHONE NUMBER".

A third is like the second, except it's a "You paid CURRENCY to SELLER" email. This one has the PayPal user's name at the top, so not as convincing perhaps.

[temp0826]

A family member fell for this while trying to recover their hacked fb account. I was around and caught wind of the call and some of the absurd steps (absurd to me, anyways) they were proposing and pulled the plug on the "support" call. The phone number was in what seemed to be a cached result of a bad search or something. '"Call us at xxx-xxxx..." not found' is what I saw. (Finding a real support number is either difficult or impossible, which makes this a good trap)

[pnw]

FWIW I sent this to a friend on the dev team at Ticketmaster and they escalated it.

[araes]

Its cool you at least attempted to do something with a bit of social connection at such a heavily targeted website.

Having personal issues with Ticketmaster's pricing methods (causing many to probably never want to do anything that might help) is a different issue than the website being used as a source for redirecting calls to fake call centers.

Since they escalated maybe something will get done. Ticketmaster would have a motivation, if large numbers fall prey to diverted call center scams it only makes their reputation flounder even worse.

(...obvious joke here would be if the scammers actually offer better support, they're just trying to steal call center business)

[pnw]

Looks like they already tweaked it so the result is less useful to the scammers.

[luma]

Terry Davis would never have let this slide

[madacol]

This one is even more believable

    https://help.ticketmaster.com/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=help%22%20%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%20Need+Ticketmaster+Support%3F+Call+this+phone+number+-%3E+1-888-BIG-SCAM.

[levocardia]

Wow. Programmatic SEO and its consequences. Genius...

[miki123211]

This actually makes sense to me; if you're an artist selling tickets on Ticketmaster, it's in everybody's interests to let you show ads for those tickets to your fans.

If only the Ticketmaster team could show ads on that domain, all these ads would have to go through their marketing team (and use ticketmaster's budget, with all the accounting and invoicing this requires), which would massively slow things down.

Instead, it seems that Google has some kind of protection where ads mentioning Ticketmaster must link to their official domain, to prevent things like this from happening. The scammers just found a way for that domain to display arbitrary text.

[redeux]

I found and removed one of these from my company's forums. When I Googled the number I could see it was on a ton of other support forums.

[RGamma]

How desperate one has to be...

[OkGoDoIt]

Have you tried getting ticketing support from Ticketmaster? Even a sketchy phone number is better than no option at all…

[RGamma]

I don't mean reaching for support. I mean setting up a scam like this. It seems so bottom of the barrel scummy, creative too, but mostly scummy.

Imagine you have the creativity and criminal energy to conceptualize and operate something like this (and the rat tail of justice evasion, laundering money, etc). It seems so much easier to make money in the honest economy.

Unless of course you're operating for a rogue state...

[AngryData]

People do this sort of thing specifically because the "honest" economy is not really that great except for a small percentage of people.

[advael]

You've got a shocking amount of faith in the honest economy for this moment in time

[genewitch]

"This moment" that has lasted about 22 years or so. There were two good runs if you had money to invest, but whatever.