New Delhi, January 17: The Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Limited (GCMMF), popularly referred to as Amul, has issued a notice to the Indian arm of search engine giant Google, over the "fraudulent franchise advertisements" being posted on its platform. The dairy marketing firm has alleged that fake entities, masquerading as Amul agents, sell out franchise to people through Google ads.

In the notice sent to Google India Pvt Ltd on January 10, Amul issued a sternly-worded warning, demanding the search platform to enact immediate measures to prevent the misuse of brand identities. The company said that the onus lies on Google to crosscheck the background of the advertisers before accepting paid ads related to large companies.

"They (Google) have benefited from Google Search advertising campaigns, which are being misused to scam innocent individuals in the name of Amul in India," GCMMF managing director RS Sodhi said.

The statement said a series of fake business-to-business (B2B) campaigns regarding "Amul Parlors, Distributors" was being circulated through fake websites using Google Search ads since September 2018.

These made fake promises of a business opportunity with Amul. "Many Indians across the geography of India and age group have been robbed of their hard earned money," Mr Sodhi asserted.

Amul stated that it had raised this issue with Google India and had sought their help to stop miscreants from using their platform through paid advertisements.

"It has been observed, Google Ads platform is allowing such miscreants to use its paid promotion services repeatedly without any background checks and in the process earning revenues from the click based advertising on their page," the Amul statement said.

"This has led Amul to issue a legal notice to Google India and goDaddy.com for holding them accountable for misuse of their platform and earning revenues through advertisements (subscription in the case of godaddy.com) on their platform on account of innocent individuals across India," it added.

Amul ran a promoted ad on Google Search to educate customers against such fake campaigns, and had created a dedicated page about it.

(With IANS inputs)

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jan 17, 2019 08:18 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).