It’s time to renew my passport–it’s been 10 years!–so I went online to see how to do it. There was a link right at the top. I clicked on it, went through a few pages, and then it was time to pay . . . there was a passport fee, a mailing fee, and a processing fee.
Why this extra fee? I looked carefully and saw that this was a .com, not a .gov site.
Damn! I got scammed. OK, I didn’t actually pay, just wasted a few minutes. I went back to the search page and scrolled down . . . OK, here it is:
That’s more like it. It worked fine. I gave them my credit card information. Cool. Now we’ll just have to see if it actually happens, given that the government is shut down.
In the meantime, that scam site now has all my personal information, so that’s annoying. They know my passport number! Let’s hope they don’t use this to manufacture a false passport for somebody. That’s the kind of crime that would send them to jail for a few months until they pay somebody off and then get a presidential pardon.
OK, now you might look at the image at the top of this post and say, Hey, you fool, it’s obvious that was a sponsored site. And, yes, it is obvious. But that’s the point. I’m internet-savvy, I write about internet scams all the time, I know about Google putting fake stuff at the top of the search page, and I still got scammed. It happens!
P.S. Our research is partially funded by Google. Google’s a big place, they do some bad things and a lot of good things.
P.P.S. The passport arrived on time, no problem.