They’re impossible to miss online: all those ads hawking cheap drugs, penny stock fortunes, low mortgage rates and instant wrinkle-zapping solutions. For consumers, it’s not always obvious which operators are legitimate.
Search companies such as Google say they work hard to make sure ads that run alongside their search results are law-biding businesses. But government investigators have raised questions about whether Google and other major search engines have profited from selling ads to illegal online companies.
Full story: Is Google profiting from illegal ads?