Author Cory Doctorow duped by fake Thai restaurant scam

Cory Doctorow, a Californian author, journalist, and activist, recently fell victim to a fake website scam after searching for a local Thai restaurant’s website. 

Doctorow intended to order takeout from Kiin, a popular Burbank Thai restaurant in his neighborhood and proceeded to search for their website on Google. 

However, instead of finding the official website, Doctorow stumbled upon a fake website that had been cleverly designed to look identical to the real one.

The fake website, which appeared as an ad at the top of the Google search results, was registered under the domain name https://kiinthaila.com, which was in no way associated with the real restaurant. The fake site even managed to place an order on behalf of Doctorow at the real restaurant, but with a markup of 15 percent. 

Luckily, the staff at Kiin were quick to recognize the fraudulent activity and canceled the order placed through the fake website. They even called Doctorow to inform him of the situation, advising him to cancel his payment to the fake website through American Express.

Doctorow was shocked and outraged by the experience, questioning how the scammers were able to obtain an Amex merchant account under the name “KIINTHAILA” without being detected. 

“How the actual f**k did these obvious scammers get an Amex merchant account in the name of “KIINTHAILA” after supplying the phone number for a website hosting company?” he asked.

“What is Amex’s (know your customer) procedure? Do they even call the phone number?”

He also criticized Google Ads for accepting payments from scam artists for businesses that already have a knowledge box (are recognized as the real thing) on Google’s search results page.

He argued that Amex, Google, and website hosting company Wix should be able to spot and prevent these fraudulent activities.

“Google Knows what the real Kiin restaurant is, and yet they are accepting payment to put a fake Kiin listing two slots above the real one,” he said. 

Doctorow feared that there may be countless other fake Wix websites and Amex merchant accounts for real businesses, with Google Ads selling ads to these scammers for each one.