UPDATE: Jan. 24, 2024, 10:00 a.m. EST This piece has been updated to include a statement provided to Mashable by Google.
Do a Google search for "Shark Tank keto gummies" and you'll find a slew of paid sponsored search ads promoting the supposed weight loss product.
Scroll past all of those advertisements and you'll find even more posts, this time organic results, also praising these keto weight loss gummies allegedly endorsed by Mark Burnett's hit ABC show starring famous entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban and Kevin O'Leary.
Don't buy those products. Shark Tank and all of the business minds on the show have absolutely nothing to do with them. The whole "Shark Tank keto gummies" market is a fraudulent scheme to make money off of fans of the show.
And perhaps most concerning, these scams wouldn't succeed without Google's help.
Mashable reached out to Google with examples of the sponsored search scam ads. The company responded with the following statement.
“We do not allow ads on our platform that scam users, make misleading statements, or imply a false affiliation or endorsement," Google said in an email to Mashable. "We are reviewing the ads in question and will remove those that violate our policies and suspend the associated accounts where warranted. While there are bad actors who attempt to circumvent our protections on Search, our advanced spam-fighting systems keep our results helpful and 99% spam free for the billions of queries we see everyday.”
The Shark Tank keto gummies scam
Weight loss products have long-been a market ripe for fraud, especially on online marketplaces where diet pills and other supplements are hawked as magical solutions to vulnerable people's health or self-esteem problems.
“I get heartbreaking emails from people who ask me why [Shark Tank keto gummies] don’t work. How they are overweight and really trusted my brand or the Shark Tank brand when they made the purchase,” said Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban on the problem in correspondence with adtech watchdog Check My Ads.
Cuban reached out to Check My Ads upon seeing its co-founder, Nandini Jammi, share her own experience getting scammed by fraudulent products being advertised via Google search's sponsored results.
In Jammi's case, she had been scammed by a fake shoe search ad before Christmas. When she posted about her frustrations with the state of online advertising, Cuban asked that she look into a similar search-related scam, Shark Tank keto gummies.
Tweet may have been deleted
After Cuban reached out to Jammi, Check My Ads looked further into the Shark Tank keto gummies ads on Google and found that scammers are utilizing Google's products in numerous ways to push their scheme onto unsuspecting consumers.
Check My Ads shared their report exclusively with Mashable. What we found also backs up previous Mashable investigations that show Google products are successfully being weaponized by scammers.
For example, in November 2022, Mashable reported how fraudsters were using the Google Sites platform to set up phishing websites to steal people's passwords and other sensitive information. Often in those cases, scammers enjoyed added search engine-related benefits as their Google Sites-powered pages were prominently displayed on Google search.
In the case of Check My Ads' report on Shark Tank keto gummies, the organization found four different avenues in which Google played a role in perpetuating the scam.
Paid search ads
Google sponsored ads look just like regular, organic search results. The tech giant does add a "Sponsored" label above these paid-for results, but not all users notice it. And sometimes, Google displays so many sponsored results that it's hard to tell exactly where the ads end and the organic search results begin.
Furthermore, companies offering real products and services run sponsored search ads, too, so the label itself doesn't necessarily mean a website is sketchy. In fact, many scammers have excelled at purchasing domain names for their fraudulent website that look like they can ostensibly be official URLs from an actual reputable company.
We've already detailed what a prominent role Google search plays in hawking Shark Tank keto gummies, a product which does not exist, to unsuspecting consumers. In one such instance, Check My Ads found four sponsored search results at the top of a Google search promoting these fraudulent gummies. That would be the first four links a user sees on the page.
According to Check My Ads, it reported some of the advertisers promoting these scams in mid-December. Around a month later, all of the reported advertisers were still running these ads.
As of Tuesday, Jan. 23, one of the scam advertisers is still running fraudulent Shark Tank weight loss product ads.
Organic search results
As Check My Ads discovered, even if a user was to scroll past the sponsored ads and look at organic search results, many of the links that Google ranks are also promoting the scam.
In fact, the FTC's own page with a specific warning about scammers advertising "Shark Tank-approved" products does not appear until after the sponsored posts and a few organic posts promoting such scam products. Other articles warning users about the keto gummy scams, like this one from USA Today, also don't rank until further down the search results page.
But it's not only that Google isn't prominently showing reputable websites warning users of these scam products. Google's organic search results are ranking fake websites promoting the scam products in the top spots.
For example, Check My Ads found that the number one ranked websites in the organic search results for "Shark Tank keto gummies" is a University of Pittsburgh link. When a user clicks that link in the search results, however, they aren't taken to a page on the university's website. Instead, they are sent to a random health domain name that's set up to mimic a CBS News local affiliate page. And that imposter page is promoting the scam keto gummies to users.
Mashable has previously reported as well on Google ranking scam websites impersonating Amazon and even Google's own products, such as YouTube. In these cases, Mashable heard from users who had been scammed because they found these websites ranked highly in Google search and trusted them for that reason.
Other Google products are incentivizing these scammers, too
One of the benefits of using Google's suite of products is how well they all work together. Scammers seem to have figured this out, too. Oftentimes, if a scam is weaponizing one Google product, other Google services have been set up by bad actors to work in tandem.
When it comes to the Shark Tank keto gummy scams, Check My Ads found that the fraudsters hawking these fakes are also benefiting from Google Analytics and Adsense.
Many of the scam websites running ads for fake products are using Google Analytics to track how customers find their website in order to tweak their marketing campaigns for maximum exposure.
To double-dip on their Google-assisted earnings, some scammers run fake "review" websites where they pose as neutral third-parties giving positive ratings to their scam keto gummy products. These websites often service Google Ads which help their owners monetize the site via the Adsense program.
This has long been a problem
As we've mentioned throughout the piece, scammers utilizing Google products for financial gain is far from a new phenomenon. And Google knows about it. The company has previously provided statements to Mashable when we report on similar scam-related issues. Google, for its part, says it removes tens of millions of scam ads and rolled out stricter advertiser verification processes.
But, as Check My Ads tells us, Google runs trillions of ads a month so the ads it takes action on make up a very small percentage of the total that run. In addition, each of the advertisers running scam Shark Tank keto gummy ads that Check My Ads reported to Google were "verified" advertisers with the company.
"Fraudulent schemes like this are so common, we’ve lost sight of how wrong it is that Google casually mints cash off copyright infringement and malicious impersonation," said Nandini Jammi, co-founder of Check My Ads, in a statement. "This is absolutely not normal. We cannot accept this as a cost of doing business."
Topics Cybersecurity Google
