It’s infuriating (mildly may be an understatement).

My neighbor ended up getting “a virus” on her laptop. It wasn’t actually a virus as best I could tell, but instead, it was a full screen pop-up browser window with no window controls.

The scam had a bunch of scary messaging and loud sound playing an alarm with someone stating that the computer was infected and that it was also infecting Microsoft’s servers. Further, the scam insisted that she call the number on the screen or she will face legal issues.

For an older non-technical person, it was frightening.

After this happened a second time, I did a little more digging to see if I could figure out what was going on. Virus scans showed no infection and I couldn’t find much online with specifics about what I was seeing.

Turns out, my neighbor was going to Google, searching for terms like “Amazon”, and then she was clicking the first ad / sponsored link in the results expecting to be taken to the Amazon website. Instead, the sponsored ad on Google search was linking to a blog on Microsoft’s Azure hosting services, which then triggered the full screen non-closable scam.

I even tested it out on one of my old laptops. Went to Google search, tried the exact search term she used, and sure enough, the same exact thing happened. I reported the ad, it is clearly malicious and a scam. It’s ridiculous that Google actually serves up malicious ads like this. And the ad was up there for days after I reported it. I sincerely hope nobody actually got scammed by it, but I definitely feel like Google should be responsible for any damages/losses.

I did go ahead and install ad blockers on all her browsers, removed google search from being the default search engine, and showed her how to avoid clicking on ads and sponsored links if/when any slip through the cracks. So, hopefully it won’t happen again.