Google faces protecting its reputation and consumers from scammers and fraudulent products bearing the Google name and logo.
MediaPost today covered in some detail the ongoing battle that Google faces protecting its reputation and consumers from scammers and fraudulent products bearing the Google name and logo. The current company in Google’s legal sights is Pacific WebWorks who is one of the many companies promoting “get rich quick schemes” and “work from home” products to earn money.
Many of these schemes are marketed as:
- Google Cash Machine
- Google Cash
- Google ATM
- Google Money Opportunity
These are Pyramid schemes
The big issue is that these products give online marketing a bad image as these are just sales gimmicks, if you could buy a kit to rob a bank, would you? These schemes are the same and most work around pyramid schemes that require your to rob more people in order to get your money back. If making money online was this easy wouldn’t everyone be doing it, its a scam and one that should be left alone.
Stop their AdSense income
The most interesting point about is that Google controls much of the food chain that these spammers depend on such as organic search traffic, paid traffic via Google AdWords, how their measure their visitors/profits with Google Analytics and how they make supplementary revenue via “Google Adsense”. So if at any point in the process they can slow or even stop the flow, since its a useless and likely illegal product being marketed.
Avoid Get Rich Quick
Even websites that discuss about how to avoid the scam are filled with ads marketing how to get rich quick, such as the image shown on the right. Our directors advice about many of these is that you would make more money working at a Fast Food restaurant and if you want to give away your money consider lending that money to Kiva as The Lost Agency Trust does.
So if Google as a company cannot control even its own brand/image within its own search engine how can other companies expect win similar fights without such an advantage?