Great Irish Times account of a Gmail scam

Brendan Burgess

Brendan Burgess

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Mike Milotte was thinking of buying a camera. He gmailed some of his friends about it. Next thing a banner ad appeared in his gmail account advertising this camera. He paid €2,500 and never saw the camera or his money again. Gmail say they have no responsibility.

Read the full article [broken link removed]
 
Salutary lesson about the dangers of internet fraud. Don't see how Google can have any liability.

If I bought a newspaper which had an ad for a camera for €2,500 and I purchased from the advertiser who absconded with my money I can hardly expect the newspaper to rectify the fraud.
 
Interesting scam, targeting the user's confidence that they were inside a safe sandbox i.e. their email account.
I would however be very wary of buying something from a site for €2500 which usually costs €5000 and would do a decent amount of investigation into the company and website. I assume a whois.com would've shown the website was registered in Lithuania....
Is it not possible to claim the cash back from your credit card in this scenario though, since it is fraud (since people are always advised to make say furniture purchases on credit card to have some recourse if issue arises)?
 
I don't think that comparing Google to the Irish Times is appropriate. The guy mentioned a particular type of camera in his email to a friend and Google inserted a specific ad for that. I think that is very dangerous. I don't think Google is liable, but I think they need to review how to stop this.
Is it not possible to claim the cash back from your credit card in this scenario though, since it is fraud
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The scammers had this covered, very cleverly.

if I paid by credit card, they told me, there would be a 17.5 per cent surcharge, but I could save this by transferring funds directly from my bank to theirs.
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Fair play to the author for admitting to this story publicly. Anyone could get caught by this.
 
Ah I didnt see that, in fairness though that should've been a major red flag, as should've been any mention of transferring funds to a bank account. 17.5% surcharge for a credit card surely should sound insane to a prospective customer! Though as you say the person was honest in saying "And, if I’m honest, I didn’t want to be put off at this stage"
 
An expensive camera for half the 'normal' RRP and a request to transfer money directly into a foreign bank account...

I think there is only one person to blame here.
 
First rule for internet purchases: If it's too good to be true, it's too good to be true.

Fair dues though to him for publicly admitting he's been scammed and for warning others.

Google should be nervous. They have no business snooping through peoples' e-mails even if the snooping is done by a robot.
 
Google insert ads all the time based on a browser's internet habits.

Google adsense shows ads applicable to the browser's browsing history and searches history so to speak.

Caveat emptor me thinks applies here.
 
username123 said:
in fairness though that should've been a major red flag, as should've been any mention of transferring funds to a bank account. 17.5% surcharge for a credit card surely should sound insane to a prospective customer!
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To be fair to the poor victim, while agreeing that should have been a red flag, there are legitimate companies that do have similar set ups. The 17.5% surcharge is very much over the odds (and common among fraudulent sites), but many (legit) companies will allow a discount for direct bank transfers (harwareversand, a very reputable German computer component supplier, come to mind - although the surcharge here for the use of PayPal is an additional 3%, so it's only to cover the additional fees they'd incur).

The article briefly mentions the 'quality score' used in the google adwords auction, (wrongly) suggesting that it relates to the legitimacy of an advertiser or that they're a reputable company. Sadly, that isn't the case. The QS is simply a measure of relevance which relates to the previous performance (click through rate) of a keyword (in this case the specific product name I'd guess), the historical CTR of that advertisers account (for all ads and keywords), the relevance of landing page to the ad and keyword and other similar relevance factors.
 
PaddyBloggit said:
Caveat emptor me thinks applies here.
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Precisely. If you can't recognise the difference between a bargain and a scam at those prices, you should probably cancel your internet access, you're a danger to yourself. Probably a good idea to have a safety gate on the stairs too.
 
Never believe the ads, especially gmail ads. I've notice one Irish shop keeps posting a gmail ad for a sale on say one brand, but when you go to their site theres always a lesser/different offer. I've reported it, but they keep on doing it. So the lesson is don't believe anything.
 
AlbacoreA said:
Never believe the ads, especially gmail ads. I've notice one Irish shop keeps posting a gmail ad for a sale on say one brand, but when you go to their site theres always a lesser/different offer. I've reported it, but they keep on doing it. So the lesson is don't believe anything.
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To whom did you report it?
 
Basically my heavy-handed approach is that ANY sponsored ads/google ads are usually absolute rubbish and I only buy stuff from website I know/can check for feedback via AAM or boards.ie. This has worked well more me anyway.
 
I believe most browsers have a add-on or similar mechanism for blocking ads. Works on organic search results but possibly not gmail.

Do a google search for "block ads your browser".
 
A technical question

It was around the middle of January and I had mentioned in an email to a friend that I was on the point of investing in a top-end Canon camera that would also shoot high-definition video. Within seconds of sending this message, I was astonished to see an ad for my chosen camera pop up in the banner running across the top of my inbox.
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Does gmail scan the contents of your emails? Or was this as a result of internet searches he had done on Google?

I don't mind the internet searches so much, but I don't like the idea of Google Robots reading my emails which I had assumed were confidential?
 
I think that it is a very useful article in that it will alert others to this type of scam.

I had never heard of the 17.5% CC surcharge before and it's a great indicator of a scam.

Brendan
 
Brendan,

From listening to the guy on TodayFM yesterday, I certainly got the impression that the adverts were generated by the content of the emails, not an internet search. He mentioned that in the past few days (since the scam), he has deliberately included the camera details in emails to himself, only to find the same company (with a slightly different website address) popping up on the adverts list.
 
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