A shocking scam involving fake websites that impersonate real businesses and charge customers with fake Amex merchant accounts has been exposed by Cory Doctorow, a writer and activist who writes about technology and society.

Doctorow shared his story on Twitter, where he told how he was scammed when he tried to buy some takeout food from a website called kiinthaila.com. He found out that the website was actually a fake one created by scammers using Wix, a platform that allows anyone to create websites effortlessly. The scammers also created fraudulent Amex merchant accounts for real businesses and used them to charge customers who ordered from their fake websites.

Doctorow contacted Amex to report the fraud, but he was disappointed by their response. He said they did not seem interested in investigating the scam or shutting down the fraudulent accounts. He also pointed out that Google was promoting these scammers by showing their ads as the first search result instead of the official website, which is kiinthaiburbank.com.

This scam is not only harmful to customers who lose their money and trust, but also to legitimate businesses whose names and reputations are damaged by these scammers. It is alarming that Google even allows these scammers to manipulate its search results and put its users at risk.

The tweet has then since garnered over 66.9 thousand likes on Twitter as of publishing, increasing the pressure on Google to put measures in place to prevent the scams from occurring.

In other news, Microsoft is aiming for Google’s search engine market share. This month, the tech giant Microsoft announced that it is bringing OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 technology to the company’s search engine, Bing. To read more on the new Bing, you can follow our coverage here.

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