Google Still Promotes Cryptophishing Sites Binance CEO Warns

by · October 27, 2022

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) has warned that Google search results still promote crypto-phishing and scam websites.

Despite Google’s strict crypto marketing policies for its ad service, fraudsters have still slipped through the cracks in recent years. Sometimes scam websites have even been shown higher than legitimate crypto and blockchain projects.

In an Oct. 27 tweet, CZ warned that when you search for CoinMarketCap on Google, phishing pages appear with an “ad” tag in front of the site itself.

“This affects users who add smart contract addresses to MetaMask using these phishing websites. We are trying to contact Google about this, and in the meantime notify users about this through social channels,” he said.

CoinMarketCap is one of the most used crypto data aggregators in the market, was acquired by Binance for an undisclosed fee back in April 2020. Given its popularity, a lot of traffic can be directed to these scam ads.

In some cases, phishing websites can be hard to spot, as they usually use copycat URLs to trick unsuspecting people into clicking. For example, one of the sites CZ highlighted was spelled “coinomarketcaap.”

In April this year, blockchain security firm SlowMist uncovered a Terra (LUNC)-related phishing scam where bad actors used Google Ads to run copycat websites using the Achor Protocol and Astroport branding.

According to SlowMist, the promoted sites ranked ahead of the actual sites people searched for, and went on to swipe around $4.31 million in LUNC from 52 addresses between April 12th and April 21st.

Related: Sneak fake Google Translate app installs cryptomines on 112,000 PCs

In November 2021, the research department of cybersecurity firm CheckPoint also published a report warning that around $500,000 was stolen by fraudsters who used Google Ads to promote phishing websites impersonating crypto wallet providers MetaMask and Phantom.

Google’s ad service has been a topic of great interest this week after parent company Alphabet highlighted in its third-quarter earnings call that search advertising spending by financial and crypto firms fell quarter-over-quarter.

“We saw a decline in spend for some advertisers in certain areas of search ads. For example, in financial services, we saw a pullback in subcategories of insurance, loans, mortgages and crypto,” said Philipp Schindler, chief business officer at Google. However, it appears that the firm has no qualms about accepting ad payments from scammers.