Blogger, a fake lottery and Googles continuing lack of interest

My previous post concerned an impersonation of the Nigerian Customs Service, but that's not the only fraudulent Google blog that's been around far too long. Far from it.

Many people have received emails claiming that they have won a lottery they have never entered. These take on myriad forms, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, BMW, Coca Cola, the BBC and many other companies and organisations have been, and continue to be impersonated in these nefarious scams.

Victims are told that that it is possible to win a lottery they never entered for a variety of reasons, their email address was entered automatically or random email addresses were selected for entry, for example. But in order to claim the large cash prize waiting for them they need to pay a fee first.

No legitimate lottery ever demands or requires a fee to be paid in order to collect any winnings.

So with that in mind, lets look at http://www.usalotterynews.blogspot.com/

The first thing wrong with this blog, is the fact that it is a blog, a legitimate lottery company handing out large cash prizes would have it's own domain, because it would easily be able to afford one.

The second is that it's clearly stolen it's logo from the UK National Lottery.

Third, the author has bad English, indicative that the author of this is not American.

Fourth, as I said above, this blog claims that your email address can win a lottery.

Fifth, the discrepancy between first posting date and copyright can't possibly be reconciled, even if the logo wasn't stolen.

All this is obvious just by quickly looking at the blog, without even searching for this "United State Lottery Board of Directors", which doesn't exist.

Despite continuing to report this fraudulent blog to Google since April 2014, including reporting alongside blogs that do fit Googles abuse form and asking them to also look at this, it's been allowed to continue to lend a thin veneer of respectability to the scammers behind this blog and assist them in defrauding the public.

Blogger, Nigerian Customs Impersonation and Googles lack of interest

The company that enables and allows me to post this blog, also has several tales of shame to tell if you know where to look. This is only the first of these tales.

For our first example we have: http://customsng.blogspot.com/, which claims to be the Nigerian Customs Service website.

This is to most people laughable, even without knowing that the legitimate Nigerian Customs Service website is https://www.customs.gov.ng/index.php, no government anywhere has ever used a free service, or blog, to host their official website.

And yet even knowing this, this fraudulent blog has been is existence, according to the 'nigeria customs' Blogger profile that created it, since March 2013. Let that sink in for a moment, Google has allowed a fake blog to impersonate a legitimate Nigerian Government service for over two years. Maybe they didn't know it existed?

I've been reporting this fake blog to them since April 2014.

Most services that host free sites or blogs allow anyone to either email or fill in a web form to report abuse, which they then investigate and act accordingly, removing or suspending any content they agree to be abusing their services,  and Google does this too.

So why haven't they removed this fake blog?

Well, because any abuse email to Google gets this auto-response:

"Hello,

Please note that this is an automated message, and responses to this message will not be reviewed. For all legal removal requests, please fill out our web form at http://support.google.com/legal.

For more information or support with other issues, please see the following links:

Removing outdated information from Google's search results: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

Google Search removal policies: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2744324?hl=en

Support for Google's products and services: http://support.google.com/?hl=en

Google's Privacy Policy: http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/

Regards,
The Google Team"

At least it points to alternatives. So lets look at the alternative that applies to this blog. http://support.google.com/legal which leads to a web page where you need to fill in the options, firstly which service is being abused, in this case blogger, and are then confronted with multiple options.

The only one which mentions impersonation requires that the reporter be the person or entity being impersonated.

Perhaps the option needed is in the not mentioned above?

Unfortunately not.
You know this blog is fraudulent, you want to inform Google, as the hosting company of the abuse of their services, but they don't want to know, because this fraudulent blog doesn't fit any category of what they define as abuse of their services.

It gets worse. While reporting blogs to Google that can be made into one of the categories above, which they will remove, albeit slowly, I also asked them to investigate this blog as well.

While all of the other fraudulent blogs were removed, this one continues to carry on in assisting to defraud the public.