IT WON’T STOP YOU BEING AD

TWO FACED ‘Gordon Moss’ on scam sites

The heat is being turned up on Google over the financial scams it promotes through Google Ads.

The Financial Conduct Authority said on Tuesday that it and other online platforms “bear clear legal liability” for the adverts they publish.

This follows a salvo last week when Charles Randell, chairman of the FCA, attacked the online giant for failing to tackle frauds, saying: “Whatever Google are doing, so far it’s not working.”

He pointed out that more than half of the first page of results for a search for highreturn investments were clearly scams, something I’ve been exposing for some time.

Take uk-investmentbonds.com, which was added to the FCA’s alert list of unauthorised firms on September 2.

This week, if you searched for bonds with good interest rates you could still find it at the top of the results thanks to Google Ads.

One of the testimonials on its site is from someone using the name Gordon Moss, saying: “I would definitely recommend to any of my friends or family wanting to get the best out of their pension pot.

“The service I received from Alan Thomas and Terry Matthews was excellent.”

Gordon Moss, with a different picture, says exactly the same thing on uk-savingsaccounts.com, which amazingly also seems to employ two blokes called Alan Thomas and Terry Matthews who provide excellent service.

And they’re at whichfixedrates.co.uk too. And uksavingssociety.com – that one’s also on the FCA’s alert list.

The scammers are so lazy they can’t be bothered to re-write their own fake testimonials, so it really should not be difficult for Google to spot them.