Sub Prime Loan Affiliates Hijacking Adwords Accounts
October 21, 2011 • Article by Dan Fallon
At Search Star we work for one the UK’s larger loan brokers generating hundreds of leads every day for their call centre.
Over the past week we have seem a huge influx of what we suspect are fraudulent Adwords accounts coming in to the market and stuffing the PPC rankings. Effect on our client is that it drives up CPC and reduces lead volumes as well as making them more erratic & harder to manage.
We’ve spoken to our account team at Google and are getting variations on “We’ve passed it on & can’t comment” but six days later the fraudsters are still regularly there! Google’s ad revenue in the UK sub prime loan market is c. £20 million per month so they surely cant be blind to the effect this is having?
In the screengrab above we’ve circled some of the fraudsters we spotted yesterday 19/10/11. All inputs & discussion welcomed.