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Google challenges 'copycats'

15.04.14

Google has announced that it has cracked down on 'copycat' websites which mimic official government services such as tax returns, vehicle tax renewals and passport applications.

You may remember Consort warned our contractors back in January that companies were trying to replicate official government websites to 'cash-in' on these services that would usually be free.

'TaxRewardGateway.com' (which is now obsolete) paid Google a fee so that their advertisement would appear near the top of the page when people searched phrases such as 'online tax return'. Upon clicking on the link, users would be taken to a page which looked remarkably like that of HMRC's, but they'd be charged a fee to complete a process which would otherwise be completely free of charge on the HMRC website.

A Google blog in January read: 'We've allocated substantial technical, financial and human resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web. Hundreds of our engineers, policy experts and others have dedicated their careers to this work. We removed more than 350 million bad ads from our systems in 2013.'

Consort would like to warn our contractors that despite this good news and Google's improved efforts, there are still websites out there using similar tactics to trick people into paying for a service that they don't need to. If you find a suspicious advertisement on Google, please report it here.

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