Yesterday, Google honored the creator of the Esperanto language, L.L. Zamenhof for his 150th birthday with one of their special doodles. Online scammers took the day to attack the Google doodle with malicious websites filled with phony anti-virus ads.
Occasionally, Google honors someone or an event with a special Google logo called a Google doodle. Regularly, online scammers are trying to find ways to get their websites in front of people surfing the web.
Yesterday, these scammers used the popular Google doodle honoring Dr. Zamenhof as a way to scam the online public. In the past, online scammers have used popular trends, such as those listed in Google Trends, as ways to get their fake offer seen.
What the online scammers do is they either create a website or hijack a legitimate website and put their fake offer on the website. They fill the website with keywords and tags that will cause the site to be listed in the top search results on sites such as Google and Bing.
Then when someone opens up the infected site, a box pops up saying that their computer is infected with a virus and they need to purchase the anti-virus program offered on screen. The offer is a scam and the scan and anti-virus program is not real.
The difference in what the scammers did yesterday compared to what they do every day is they attacked the popular Google doodle. The scammers were pretty busy at it too.
There were times yesterday, about half of the first page for searches on the L.L. Zamenhof Google doodle were infected sites. This kept Google busy searching for and removing these infected sites.
Hopefully these online scammers will not stop Google from continuing to create their special doodles. The Google doodles are fun, entertaining and as the case of yesterday; they are educational.
Written by Denise Clay
For Huliq
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