Google is going after 50 John and/or Jane Does as well as Pacific WebWorks in an effort to smash the scams online that are offering work-from-home jobs. The lawsuit is just another step on Google’s war against deceptive marketing and advertising on their ad network. As more businesses and people are discovered, they too will be added to the suit.
Google goes to court over work-from-home scams.(IMG:J.Anderson)
The claims on some sites, such as those pushing “Easy Cash with Google” or “Make $978 a Day Working from Home” are too good to be true in the minds of some, and they are correct. Google has never had such programs, and there is no magic Google ATM for fast money from the search giant.
“To fight back, we're working to stop various fraudulent "Google Money" schemes, and this week filed suit against Pacific WebWorks [PDF] and several other unnamed defendants,” said Jason Morrison and senior litigation counsel Stacey Wexler in a post to the Google blog.
“Even as we're taking legal action to try to cut these sites off at the source, we're still working constantly to remove scammy URLs from our index, and we'll permanently disable AdWords accounts that provide a poor or harmful user experience, whether or not they use Google's trademarks illegally. That said, we can't guarantee that schemes like these won't pop up, like the proverbial "Whack-A-Mole", someplace else online — either on a different network or under a different name.”
In addition to announcing the lawsuit, Google offered some of the more common names used by these work-from-home kits, so that people can spot the con faster. The kits include names such as, Google Adwork, Google ATM, Google Biz Kit, Google Cash, Earn Google Cash Kit, Google Fortune, Google Marketing Kit, Google Profits, and others.
According to financial documentation, Pacific WebWorks reported over $21 million in profit for the fiscal year. According to their 10-Q filing, “Management expects revenues to increase but at a lower growth rate, near 10-percent to 20-percent annually, in the future.”
It’s hard to tell if those predictions will come true, as their stock fell sharply after the lawsuit was made public, which if you are interested, can be monitored here. The company has made no public statements on the suit, and none are expected honestly. If they do, we’ll update this story with them.
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