It has been brought to the notice of Twitter users warning them of Ad pop-ups of phishing sites on Google, whenever one searches for CoinMarketCap. That too is displayed right before the real website. This is a cause for worry.
Google Yet To Resolve The Phishing Sites
CoinMarketCap is owned by Binance Holding Limited. The founder of this Company is Changpeng Zhao. the users have been venting their frustration on Google which is yet to resolve the matter even after so many reminders for the same.
Even though Google has firm policies pertaining to the marketing of crypto regarding advertising services, scammers have been able to penetrate and have often slipped through. This has been going on for years. It has been noticed on many occasions that these fake sites have displayed more legitimacy than the original ones.
CoinMarketCap is one of the highly clicked sites for crypto data aggregators. This site was bought by CZ in 2020. The price that CZ paid was not disclosed. Since it is a very popular site scammers are using copycat ads to divert unattentive visitors to them. They use a similar layout and just change a letter here or there.
A few months back SlowMist, a blockchain firm that deals in the security reported unearthing phishing scams that showed poor actors were seen using these ads. Astroport branding and Achor protocol were utilized to run these copycat sites. One site, as pointed out by CZ was ‘CoinoMarketCaap’.
These fake sites of the originals are ranked much ahead of the actual sites and have managed to swindle USD 4.31 M NFTs within a few days in April.
Earlier in November 2021, a cybersecurity firm published a report that scammers swindled $500 K using Google ads. They promoted the phishing sites that aped Phantom and MetaMask, crypto wallet providers.
