Four years ago, my colleague Jeremy B. Merrill wrote about Google directing people to websites that tricked small business owners into thinking they were on the Internal Revenue Service site. People on Reddit forums have also complained for years about being fooled by IRS look-alike websites.
But Google keeps enabling this trickery.
In my recent Google searches related to obtaining a business taxpayer identification number — which the IRS requires of many organizations — the “sponsored” results (aka, ads) at the top sometimes showed sites with “IRS” or “Gov” in their web addresses. But they were not the IRS.
The fine print on some of those websites says the sites are not from the government but rather paid middlemen that offer to help businesses get their taxpayer ID numbers. The IRS hands out these ID numbers free on its website in minutes.
Maybe you think you’d never fall for websites like these that capitalize on confusion with the IRS, but plenty of people do. It’s not their fault.
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Over and over, Google profits from steering people away from free government services. Google told me the three listings in the screenshot with this story violate its rules that only allow “certified governments and authorized providers” to buy ads for government services.
The company said it blocked those ads. I have already found more that appear to break Google’s rules.
The persistence of this IRS deception and others shows that Google fails to effectively police the top of its search results, the most valuable real estate in internet history. Keep reading for steps to protect yourself.
Honestly, how does Google keep messing up like this?
Google keeps getting fooled by con artists and people hunting to make a quick buck off you.
It’s common knowledge in the travel industry that scammers manipulate Google search results to impersonate airline customer service. Google has gotten paid to promote websites that hijack people’s computers when they click on sites that pretend to be AI site Midjourney and YouTube.
Google’s misdirection for government services may be the most maddening.
I did multiple searches recently mimicking a business owner seeking an employer identification number, or EIN. Repeatedly but not always, I saw non-IRS sites as the ads, or “sponsored” links, at the top of Google.
Some of the sites charged more than $300 for “help” obtaining an EIN, which is free from the IRS. It’s not clear how the sites help.
The IRS warns against sites that charge for an EIN. That’s good advice, said Mike Litt, who focuses on consumer financial protection for the advocacy group U.S. PIRG.
Rebecca Tushnet, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in advertising and intellectual property, said sites offering paid help for government services can be problematic if people are deceived and take actions like entering their personal information because they believe the sites are the IRS. I spoke to one person who said he did just that.
Fine print saying sites aren’t affiliated with the government generally isn’t legally sufficient, Tushnet said.
The biggest culprit, though, is Google. It takes money to promote websites that confuse taxpayers and violate the company’s own policies. Google says it’s continually improving its detection systems to catch bogus ads.
You can bet misleading ads will recur.
What you can do
Many internet companies like Google and Meta have long lists of prohibited deceptions that they can’t or won’t enforce.
That puts an unfair burden on us to self-police websites and apps from companies that are worth trillions of dollars. Here’s some advice:
Don’t click the “sponsored” links. Google doesn’t effectively stop bad actors from buying ads. Keep scrolling until you no longer see sponsored results.
For all search results, take a second to eyeball the web address. It should end in “.gov” if it’s a government website. Also be careful of information highlighted at the top of Google, in Google Maps business listings and in Google’s question-and-answer sections. Scammers can game those listings.
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If you know the official website, do a tailored search. Add “site”: (with no space after it) to restrict your search to a website you know is authentic. For example: employer ID number site:irs.gov
You should only see search results from the official IRS website, though I found an example of a non-IRS “sponsored” link in a site-restricted search.
**Try DuckDuckGo:**On the privacy-focused search engine, the IRS was generally at the top of results for my EIN-related searches. I didn’t see sponsored listings for IRS look-alikes. (People have found bogus ads at the top of DuckDuckGo before, though.)
An extreme option: Ditch search engines for AI. I tried typing business tax ID searches into Perplexity, an AI search engine. Some of the answers took me to the right spot on the IRS website. Others weren’t good. But at least for now, AI services aren’t as plagued with tricky ads or manipulated information.
My colleague Jeremy suggested asking Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, if the Google ads for tax ID help sites were scams. Gemini mostly did great, including identifying red flags of one of the websites.
Gemini instead directed people to IRS.gov for tax-related matters. It’s too bad that Google search doesn’t follow Google’s advice.
Jeremy B. Merrill contributed.
This story was originally published at washingtonpost.com. Read it here.