Scam site advertised on google shopping - how do they pull it off?

Searched for a product on google shopping. Take note of the first ad under "sponsored":

https://www.google.com/search?psb=1&tbm=shop&q=STGD2000100&ved=0CAQQr4sDKAJqFwoTCJ7d56q21-cCFa4UCgMd-WoJhRAC

It's a link to http://www.vadervor.com, where the product is listed for about half of what it is selling for everywhere else. Looking at their site, it appears that they just duplicate amazon listings and assign them really low prices to get greedy suckers to hand over their credit card numbers. The bullshit "sale" price with a countdown timer is a nice touch.

What amazes me is that they actually seem to have a processing company charge people's cards, and that they take all the major ones. I tried placing an order with a preloaded card with a low balance, and their system returned the insufficient funds error message, suggesting that a company actually processed the transaction. I figured they would just take your credit card #, pretend to process the order, but then never send the product and sell the card number on the darknet or something.

I guess it's not surprising that they are able to place google ads, but the fact that processing companies actually charge cards for them is surprising. I thought it was more difficult than that to open a merchant account with a payment processing company - they want to avoid a deluge of chargebacks. I know someone who started a catering business and they had to jump through a lot of hoops to convince them they were a legitimate business.

What if they return the insufficient funds message to everyone without checking the card? You can try it with a card from FakeNameGenerator, if it still says insufficient funds with a fake card, then that's probably the case.

Kommando said:

What if they return the insufficient funds message to everyone without checking the card? You can try it with a card from FakeNameGenerator, if it still says insufficient funds with a fake card, then that's probably the case.

Click to expand...

I tried that. It said "Your card was declined." It can tell the difference.

I often see crappy phishing sites promoted on FB Ads. No big surprise someone could do the same with Adwords.

That domain is not up from my ISP.

Look, hooking up with a payment processor isn't that hard if you have the proper documentation. The shadier solutions don't even require so much on the documentation side. They also require that the clients paying through the gateway to have a sort of KYC completed, then it's really none of their business what happens. You end up getting scammed, you take it up with Mastercard or VISA. The payment processor isn't so much liable in such situations.

Also, the link leads to a shop that isn't working anymore.

And before you could complain further, the site is gone already. That's almost about the time a BH site would stay up if you're trying to game Adwords or FB Ads and eventually you'll have to move to a different/better domain and new gateways.