James Rowe: Flight – check. Hotel – check. A rip–off travel visa? Hello and welcome to Which Shorts, your free weekly insight into Which? magazine, as well as our money, tech, travel and gardening titles too.
Today I am bringing you a piece that Trevor Baker wrote for the March – April issue of Which? Travel magazine that shone a light on the scam adverts that are peppering Google and catching out unsuspecting travellers. Now more and more countries are requiring tourists to apply for a visa to enter. These should be applied for via official avenues such as government websites, but our investigation has found that Google is allowing fraudsters to pay for their fake websites to appear at the top of search results, meaning that people are being caught out while Google is making a fortune from advertising revenue.
Here is Trevor’s piece, adapted for the podcast this week, read by me, James Rowe.
If there is one thing that distinguishes scammers from officials working for government departments, it is efficiency. Just minutes after Googling "Dubai visa" and clicking on the result at the top of the search, I am being encouraged to spend $248 on a pair of travel documents for myself and my wife. It will hardly take a minute if you do it now, says the helpful sales advisor from InstaTourism via its WhatsApp advice number. Any issues you are having to complete the payment? he asks.
Yes, there is one small issue actually. You don't need to spend $124 per person on a visa to go to Dubai. For UK visitors, a visa for Dubai is free at the airport when you arrive. I am pretty confident my advisor knows this because I've already ticked the box on the website that indicates I have a British passport. That’s why he’s putting pressure on me to pay him as soon as possible.
Even when I point out that I’ve read on the UK government’s website that I don't need a visa, the advisor says, lately a lot of our customers told us the same, but at the end of the day, they got stuck at the airport just because they are not having the visa, so I would suggest you to secure the visa in advance rather than facing any last – minute hassle.
When I say that I’m going to ask my son, who I claim lives in the UAE, for advice, he doubles down. Many times it happens that the airlines won't allow you to board the flight without having the visa, he adds. So I better suggest you apply for the visa online beforehand.
These are classic tricks of fraudsters trying to frighten you and create a sense of urgency and alarm. We asked InstaTourism why it’s seemingly trying to fool unsuspecting British travellers into spending hundreds of pounds on unnecessary travel documents. It did not reply.
The complexity of travel these days – with countries such as the US, Canada, Australia and indeed the UK requiring visitors to register and pay for a visa waiver – has created a massive opportunity for scammers and rip – off merchants of all kinds. So long as they make the highest bid to Google, then the search engine will push them to the top of its results and a proportion of the confused people searching for visas will mistakenly pay for their completely unnecessary help.
But the fact they need to appear in Google results gives the search engine a lot of power. If it stops them from advertising, it can almost entirely stop them from ripping people off.
When we sent Google the results of our investigation and urged it to act, its response was encouraging. We have strict policies that govern the types of ads and advertisers we allow on our platform, it said. We only allow governments or their delegate providers to advertise for official documents or services. When ads breach our policy, we take action to remove them.
It even told us that it had removed the adverts we flagged that were against its policies. This should have been great news, except for the fact the InstaTourism website we reported was immediately replaced by another one owned by the same company. And other rip – off ads we flagged – which, while not necessarily scams, clearly breach Google’s policies – were not removed.
Incredibly, this isn't the first time Google told us it had removed dodgy ads when it hadn't. Google sent us exactly the same response – that it removes ads which breach its policies – in March 2025, when we flagged some of the same dodgy websites. Back then, we politely pointed out that as far as we could see, it hadn't removed any adverts at all. Its press office replied, let me investigate and come back to you. But we heard nothing.
A few days later, we tried again, more bluntly pointing out that what it had told us was simply not true. The PR again said, apologies, I'll certainly follow up ASAP. But again, we heard nothing.
It’s the same story this time. When we tell Google that its response is untrue and these ads haven't been removed, it just doesn't reply.
It’s not just InstaTourism that’s ripping off British travellers. We tried Googling travel visas for Australia, Canada, Cuba, Dubai, Israel, Thailand and the US. For all of them, the top search results were dominated by adverts for firms charging, in some cases, ten times as much as the real cost of the travel document.
Some sites, such as immi-assist.com, don't tell you the cost of a US ESTA until you’ve filled in pages of information about yourself. The price – £101 by the way – is difficult to spot even on the payment page. Going to the official US website is quicker and only costs $21. We reached out to this site too, but it did not reply.
One reason we’re so disappointed by Google’s failure to act is that a few years ago, we had a very different experience. When the government replaced the old European Health card, the EHIC, with the post – Brexit Global Health card, the GHIC, scammers predictably moved in. They bought Google ads and tried to sell the card – which is available for free from the NHS – to unsuspecting travellers.
We flagged the GHIC adverts to Google in January 2021, it promptly removed them and we’ve never seen this problem since. Proof that when it wants to, Google can stamp out the bad actors.
So why then has our experience with the US ESTA been so different? Google gives the impression that scam adverts are a thorny problem that happens to it. Another way to look at it is as a source of probably millions of dollars of revenue each year, given the number of scammers Google told us it identifies and removes each year. It created a complicated ecosystem where anybody can bid to advertise anything on Google.
We asked Google’s own artificial intelligence tool, Gemini, how much it thought Google is raking in from selling adverts for the ESTA search term. It estimated a startling £100,000 to £250,000 a month. And that’s just for ESTA, not for any of the other travel documents we looked at or other search terms around ESTA.
There’s obviously a major caveat. AI does sometimes just make stuff up. We asked Google’s press office whether its own AI had made it up, but it did not reply. However, we do know that Google made $264 billion in advertising revenue last year and a small part of that likely came from these dodgy websites and travellers being exploited.
We also asked Gemini AI whether we needed to pay for a visa in advance to visit Dubai. It correctly told us that we did not. When we asked it about US ESTA applications, it again gave clear, sensible advice, warning us to be aware of the copycat sites that have nothing to do with the US government.
It comes to something when artificial intelligence is a more reliable source of information than its own company spokespeople. In the future, as Google search is replaced by AI, the scammers may need to find a new way to rip people off. That’s not much consolation though to the thousands of travellers who will continue to spend hundreds of dollars on documents that they could have got for much less – or even for free.
