Security News > 2021 > October > Teen Rakes in $2.74M Worth of Bitcoin in Phishing Scam

During the early days of the pandemic, while the rest of the world was stress streaming and working on sourdough starter, an ambitious teen stuck in his bedroom decided to set up a fake "Love2Shop" gift card site to harvest people's payment information, invest the stolen money in cryptocurrency and become a millionaire.

His age certainly didn't prohibit the scammer from being allowed to purchase Google ads to help lure people to his phishing scam site, according to prosecutors, ultimately ranking the scam phishing site over the legitimate one.

"The police found a large quantity of cryptocurrency," Skinner added, "There were 48 Bitcoins and a smaller number of other coins. At the time they were worth £200,000. They are now worth a little over £2 million."

"Our goal is to create a safe and trustworthy experience for users. We take matters of ad fraud very seriously and continue to vigorously enforce our policies and be nimble when faced with new threats."

Google's current ad policies prohibit brand impersonation, replicating original content and various other forms of misrepresentation scammers use to abuse Google's platform.

When last March's Ads Safety Report was released, Google vice president Scott Spencer acknowledged that the pandemic and disinformation campaigns aimed at elections around the world have presented the company with a complicated set of challenges over the past year; but pledged to continue to invest in cybersecurity at scale.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/teen-rakes-in-2-74m-worth-of-bitcoin-in-phishing-scam/175834/