[nilram]

My sister got bit by one of these when she googled a name brand PC support company that she had used before. The search results included a phone number that connected her to these hackers. From there, they pretty much followed the steps outlined. She lost pretty much a full month's income. Because she withdrew the money herself (to transfer to bitcoin), the bank fraud department wouldn't get involved. (No idea if she contacted the state agencies I recommended.)

[dools]

Yeah fraudulent ads are a huge issue for scams, I had my entire family install ad blockers not to stop advertising but to stop scams!

[squeaky-clean]

I almost listened to someone scam my mom in realtime when he had a flight delay issue. She was calling American Airlines support, but apparently she googled something like "American Airlines delay support" and clicked on the first ad. I overheard her begin reading her credit card information and stopped her and took the phone. They probably would have done the whole remote access scam thing but we were at the airport without any computers.

[hotnfresh]

This is why in-line search ads are simply evil. They get their click through rate from fooling people, not from convincing them to click an ad on purpose. Which, aside from that being evil already, also makes them super-useful to scammers, since a high percentage of clicks are from people who think they clicked an organic search result.