Dairy company Amul has issued a legal notice to Google India in connection with fake advertisement campaigns that miscreants ran on its platform, IANS reported on Wednesday. The advertisements used Amul’s name and lured people to do business with the Gujarat-based firm.
In a release, Amul said such campaigns began appearing on Google’s search engine in September in response to keywords such as “Amul Franchise”, “Amul Parlor” and “Amul Distributor”. Users who opened such links were asked to fill forms, after which they would receive calls and pay registration fees ranging from Rs 25,000 to Rs 5 lakh. After the online payment, people would stop receiving communication, Business Standard reported.
“These individuals/organizations are having malicious intent of exploiting individuals across India with fake promises of business opportunity with Amul,” the company said. “Many Indians across the geography of India and age group have been robbed of their hard earned money.”
Amul also issued a notice to GoDaddy, a domain registration company. Google earns revenue through the advertisement campaigns it allows on its search platform. Amul said it ran advertisements itself to educate customers against fake campaigns, and had sought Google’s help to stop them, but such cases continued to occur. The company sent a legal notice on January 10. Amul said it had also raised a complaint with the Cyber Cell of Gujarat Police.
Google’s platform is allowing miscreants to use the paid promotion services repeatedly “without any background checks and in the process earning revenues from the click-based advertising on their page”, Amul said.
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