Scammers and Search Engine Optimization
As someone who needs background sounds to study, I have taken to various genres of videos on YouTube in the past few years for casual listening while working. Recently, I have found several creators (Jim Browning, Kitboga) who educate viewers about various types of scammers by calling them, gaining access to their computers or even cameras in their offices, or pranking them for hours on end. While some of their tactics to get victims to give them money are fairly obvious, like promising a refund for a service that was never ordered, introducing fake warning pop-ups, or claiming there was fraud on an account, they also sometimes use search engine optimization to make sure their sites come up for common searches.
As discussed in class, this can be done by changing the keywords that would lead to their site or by making sure many other pages direct to them, and they direct to many credible pages also. One way this could be done is by using a seemingly credible URL that could be accidentally linked on other pages, or by creating other fake pages to point to it. I checked one case of this myself, and would encourage you to try a few searches as well. Below, you can see that I did a google search for “hp printer customer support toll free number.” Fortunately, the top 3 sites appear to legitimately HP Customer Support, but the fourth is a scam site, as you can see in the second image. While tech-savvy and young people could easily identify that the top results are correct and the fourth site is bogus with grammatical errors and poor design, an elderly person might not see this. It shows that search engine optimization still has a ways to go if a scam website is still able to get to such a high result.
