Amul files legal notice against Google India over fake paid ad campaign

Indian dairy giant Amul has issued a legal notice to Google India in connection with fake advertisement campaigns that miscreants ran on its platform. Amul claims that the ads used the company’s name to lure people into doing business with them. [caption id=“attachment_5348751” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] A Google logo is displayed at the entrance to the internet based company’s office. Reuters[/caption] According to a report by Business Standard, Amul in a releaser mention that such campaigns began appearing on Google’s search engine in September, when searched using the keywords — “Amul Franchise”, “Amul Parlor” and “Amul Distributor”. Those who clicked on the links were asked to fill forms, after which they would receive calls and asked to pay a registration fee ranging from Rs 25,000 to Rs 5 lakh. Once the payment was completed, the fraudster would stop communicating with the party altogether. Amul also issued a notice to GoDaddy, a domain registration company. Google earns revenue through the advertisement campaigns it allows on its search platform via its Google LLC’s AdWords program. As per the report, Amul in a statement mentioned that it had raised this issue with Google India and had sought their help to stop miscreants from using their platform through paid advertisements. However, there was no action enacted by the tech giant to solve the issue. “It has been observed, Google Ads platform is allowing such miscreants to use its paid promotion services repeatedly without any background checks and in the process earning revenues from the click-based advertising on their page,” the Amul statement said.