Beware of Pay-Ads.com

A few days ago I joined Pay-Ads.com and added their banner code at San Pablo City but today I received a Malware notification e-mail from Lord Google informing me that malware was found in San Pablo City.

We recently discovered that some of your pages can cause users to be infected with malicious software. We have begun showing a warning page to users who visit these pages by clicking a search result on Google.com.

This was a major concern for me because I’m quite sure that San Pablo City is malware free but to make sure I checked my wordpress installation for any suspicious looking files but I found none. I then retraced everything that I did on San Pablo City in the past few days and the only thing I can remember was adding a Pay-Ads.com banner.

What I did next is search Google for Pay-Ads.com and my suspicion was confirmed. Pay-Ads.com was also marked by Lord Google of being harmful and, not only that, listed in the search result where reports from other website owners, who tried Pay-Ads.com, that had the same experience as mine.

Tim Worstall Tabloid Edition described Pay-Ads.com as “scummy, thieving bastards” for injecting malware in their banner ads and causing people grief in return.

Online Earning Opportunities, who is also a member of Entrecard does not recommed Pay-Ads.com at all saying that Pay-Ads.com “really pays but it really makes our site suck“.

Kedoa Blog also tried it and his experience with it was not pleasant at all, “it installed unwanted software, malware and god knows what else on some peoples computers“.

You can find more reports about Pay-Ads.com by searching Lord Google for “pay-ads.com”.

My biggest mistake here was I didn’t check first if the program or the site was clean or not but now I know better. From now on, even if the program or site is recommended by a Top Blogger, I’ll do some searching first before joining it.

Anyway, I’ve removed Pay-Ads.com’s banner code and I’ve also requested a review from Lord Google for San Pablo City. Knowing how Lord Google works, it may take a few days to a few weeks before that warning is removed from San Pablo City but I’m willing to wait as long as that dreadful warning is removed from San Pablo City’s google listing.

Update: A few days after removing Pay-Ads.com’s banner off of San Pablo City and after requesting a review from StopBadware.org, Lord Google has cleared San Pablo City’s search result listing of that dreadful warning.