I recently made a free account, did pass the initial small amount of charge on my card for verification and uploaded my site.
Now I’m seeing 2 unsuccessful transactions for amount of $34.95 (unsuccessful because my card didn’t have that much money since I wasn’t expecting to make any other payments).
Any ideas why are these transactions tried? I haven’t added paid plan or anything additional
Welcome
I am not sure what you are talking about, as InfinityFree does not require a credit card to signup, and does not have any sort of validation method for credit cards.
Who were the payments initiated by?
hm, that’s weird. The transaction seems to be from zlogins.com
Maybe I’ve got caught in some scam or it’s from somewhere else
@Greenreader9 do you have any idea of the legitimacy of zlogins.com and whether it could’ve been a misleading link I might’ve clicked during infinityfree registration?
I’m not familiar with zlogins.com, and I can tell you that we are not affiliated with them in any way.
This definitely seems like a scam to me.
Where exactly in the signup process were you supposedly asked to enter payment details? If something happened on our end that results in people being redirected to scam pages, we should definitely fix that.
Unfortunately I don’t remember, I was making the registration in a rush.
I searched for this website now and didn’t find any info for it. It seems like a scam indeed.
I’ll block my card and will try to go through registration process again just to see if I can recall how I’ve got myself into putting my card details in such site.
Will write here if I can recall something or reproduce it.
Thank you for the quick respone
I tried the registration process again and found how that’s happened. It seems to be via a misleading Ad. Not sure how that ad is approved by Google. Would be great if it could be removed so that other people that register without paying much attention don’t get scammed. I also tried from another phone on another network and got the same ad in the registration process of InfinityFree.
As a new member, I seem to be allowed to only upload 1 image so here’s one screenshot with the scam ad, it’s the big “COMPLETE” button. It leads to a scammy ‘register’ page that seems like a continuation of the registration process and asks for credit card details.
I meant ‘Continue’ button
Google approves those ads because people click on them by accident, and they make money.
You’ll probably want to cancel that credit card and get a new number issued. Who knows if the information your provided will be sold to someone else.
Google’s ad policies are quite strict, so I’m pretty sure that they don’t allow these kinds of ads. But I’m not sure how their actual approval mechanism actually works, and how something like this could slip their net.
As a publisher, it’s possible to block ads for certain providers, but I cannot see which companies actually advertise on our panel. So my ability to prevent these kinds of misleading is very small.
That said, if you see ads like this, I think you can click the little X in the top right corner, and from there flag the ad. That should get Google to take action and do something against this advertiser.
From the user’s screenshot advertisement belongs to fine10.com
I think these violate this paragraph “Misleading ad design”
This is how it looks for me
and green buttons such as those from hosting + “continue”
so it can confuse someone
I don’t think their intention was to deceive, but simply that advertisement is not very suitable for CA because the content from the two worlds overlaps too much.
I see so many ads like that, I really don’t think Google is enforcing all of their rules.
I do have to agree with you there. You can block by category, by specific ad, or by ad-network, but not by publisher. Which is annoying.
And from a user perspective, the ads the pop up from the bottom and top of the page are really annoying. I would probably be enabling my ad blocked no matter what you ask of me because of them.
Well, you can block URLs, so that’s a pretty decent option. But what URL should be blocked here? The ad itself says “Fine10”, but @rosisait said the payment page was on zlogins.com.
See if you can find the ad in the ad-review center, the URL is shown on that page I know.
I clicked on the “F10 ad” and this is a series of events
if “rosisait” can confirm that this is what he/she also saw (with the difference that he used a smartphone, so the appearance is somewhat different) it can shorten our search.
As far as I can see, they only want to confirm that people are over 18 and for that they ask for a card.
But pay attention to screenshot 3 and the address that has changed !
which may mean that they have dozens of domains at their disposal with which they advertise one and the same “product”, which then leads to the specified domain in img3.
(so it might not be enough to block fine10-dot-com)
Or on the other hand it can be criminal activity 
Also maybe some XY ad popped up (over the entire screen) and has nothing to do with anything mentioned here.
Yes, this was the site I was mislead to visit and enter my credit card in. I did it on mobile where I don’t have AdBlock.
This ad was incredibly misleading given that it’s a registration process and the ad itself initially shows a ‘Continue’ button. It’s very easy to get confused or misclick it given how how big the ad is.
Reported the ad, hopefully Google takes action and actually find who’s behind that since in my opinion it’s a criminal activity. My card is now blocked yet I still get notifications for initiated but unsuccessful transactions by which they are trying to take money from me.
Will report them to my local bank also.
Seems scammy url in nature
I’ve been reviewing some ads in the Ad Review Center, an AdSense feature I’ve never used before. I have blocked a number of different domains/ads that had the “click the big green button to create your account” pattern. They are also reported to Google, which hopefully helps to prevent these ads from being shown on other sites too. One particular URL that popped up a lot has now been blocked entirely.
Hopefully that should prevent ads the ads you saw to trick more people using our services.
Age verification. Seems like a scam to me haha
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