The online bank Manager.one, dedicated to professionals, has been the target for a week of a phishing campaign that abuses Google’s advertising tools, the co-founder of the French start-up Adrien Touati denounced to AFP on Tuesday.
According to him, “Google did not do its job” by allowing the scammer to appear at the top of the search results on the keyword “Manager one”, thanks to the purchase of the keyword on the Google Ads platform. . .
Google sells advertisers the ability to appear prominently in their search engine through the automated auction system for words, brands, and expressions. Contacted by AFP, Google explained on Tuesday that it had removed the disputed ads and launched a new process in France in January 2023 to verify ads promoting financial services.
On the other hand, the group does not prohibit the use of a brand as a keyword. According to Adrien Touati, a site usurping the visual identity of the online bank Manager.one had been featured since mid-February in the US giant’s advertisements. “It’s a copy of our site, there’s our home page and our login page,” he explains, and several bank customers entered their identifiers there and then validated the notification allowing the hacker to log in for them.
Possible Google subpoena
At least six customers had their accounts fraudulently debited with stolen “hundreds of thousands of euros,” according to the bank. The hacker debited up to 40,000 euros of expenses from the most affected client. “We made a report to the Prudential Control and Resolution Authority (ACPR)”, responsible for supervising the activity of banks, said Adrien Touati, who is also considering assigning Google.
In the burgeoning neobank market, buying keywords is expensive. Manager.one already spends several tens of thousands of euros a month with Google to defend its brand against its competitors.
In 2021, the cybersecurity firm Checkpoint had already raised the alarm about a major fraud using Google ads to steal cryptocurrency wallets. Google blocked more than 58.9 million fraudulent ads promoting financial services that year.
Source: BFM TV
