Google is not having a great month when it comes to fighting abuse of its ads in search by phishers, ID thieves and malware purveyors.
There are plenty of other stories about an uptick in malicious/phishous results showing up tops when people search for certain terms like popular software.
This being tax time in the US and all, it seemed prudent to remind everyone that Google ad-sponsored results -- which usually show up tops -- are extremely dicey right now when one searches for IRS-related stuff.
E.g., was running a search for a specific IRS domain and did the search "irs.gov login.gov" and two of the top three sponsored results led to domains that pretend to be affiliated with the IRS but are not:
irs-federal-ein-number[.]com, registered 98 days ago, and
irs-taxnumber[.]org (2020).
