None of this would work if Google Adsense didn't allow scam ads on their system. But they do, millions every day (I deal with this every day on my websites, Google don't care).
Hmm, how do you even protect against this one? Rewriting the entire website makes the entire situation a bit more difficult, you can control about everything.
There are lots of restaurants (legitimate ones!) that use some payment processor on the backend whose name shows up in the transaction. So asking consumers to verify the payment info, when the payment info may not match the restaurant, is a losing battle.
damn it. Every now and then I daydream about a federated network of digital delivery infra to cut out these platform middlemen but abuse/moderation like this is still what makes the idea impossible to take off. That's what you (and the restaurant) get from the centralization.
Google is the entire problem here. Pay them money and your literal scam site can sit above the real site in the search results.
Why are they allowed to direct you to literal scams? Why are they allowed to profit off of literal scams?
This affects the company I work for, who gets called every single day with customer complaints from people who clicked the scam link from a search ad when looking for our site.
Our site has existed for over a decade. There's no justifiable reason that a company who's brand is known by every single grocer or merchant to somehow show up under a literal fly by night scam company pretending to have the same name. It's unacceptable.
My sister got scammed by this exact mechanism just last week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
Why are they allowed to direct you to literal scams? Why are they allowed to profit off of literal scams?
This affects the company I work for, who gets called every single day with customer complaints from people who clicked the scam link from a search ad when looking for our site.
Our site has existed for over a decade. There's no justifiable reason that a company who's brand is known by every single grocer or merchant to somehow show up under a literal fly by night scam company pretending to have the same name. It's unacceptable.
My sister got scammed by this exact mechanism just last week.