HEY GOOGLE, DOES THIS LOOK FAMILIAR?

Google trumpeted last week that it was the first tech firm to join Stop Scams UK, a trade body made up mainly of banks and telecoms firms.

The UK managing director of Google, Ronan Harris, announced that it was also offering £3.5million in “advertising credits” to support a scams public awareness campaign.

“We know how vital it is to protect people from fraud,” he said.

“Globally, Google has also introduced new advertiser identity verification and rolled this out across the UK beginning earlier this year.

“Advertisers now need to submit personal legal identification, business incorporation documents or other information, that proves who they are and the country in which they operate.”

So, how’s Google advertiser identity verification going?

Not brilliantly, I’d suggest. On Monday, a Google search for “compare best ISA rates” brought up an advert for findisasonline.com as the second result.

“Find the best ISAs online today in 20 seconds,” it read, adding that investors would be protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

This is the same promise made by four scam sites that I wrote about only a fortnight ago, all of which claimed to find you the best ISA or savings bond in 20 seconds.

Not only was the wording almost identical, this latest site used the same pictures as the earlier scams.

Those first four claimed to be regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority but had cloned the details of two genuine FCA-regulated firms, Northern Trust Global Investments Limited and SEI Investments (Europe) Limited.

The new example, findisasonline.com, uses the same ploy, this time claiming to be a landing page of FCA-regulated GMSA Investments Limited.

This is as fake as the phone number on the website, which doesn’t work – something apparently not spotted by Google’s new advertiser identity verification.

“Thank you very much for bringing to our attention this fraud, we definitely have nothing to do with that site,” GMSA Investments director Angelo Rossetto told me.

“If from your experience, you could kindly let me know what the most efficient way of getting this removed and reported is, I will enact it immediately.”

I suggested notifying the FCA so that the fake site can be added to its scams alert list and contacting the domain supplier, Namecheap, to have it taken down.

It ‘knows how vital it is to protect from fraud’ but scam not spotted