Last night, while I was waiting for Derry Girls to come on, I watched a part of Prime Time on RTÉ, a segment about how many people intending to visit Kilmainham Gaol Museum in Dublin had bought tickets online only to find out they had been scammed and the tickets weren’t valid. Worse, having entered their credit card details into a phoney website they then either lost further money or had to cancel their compromised cards. You can read more about this scandal here.
A major part of the success of this scam is that Google search highlighted the fake sites – several of them – by ranking them above the official site in search results All you need to do to get your site promoted in this way is to pay money to Google. Although Google had been informed about this con, at least some of the sites concerned were still up and running when the programme went out last night. It seems to me that Google was and is a party to this fraudulent activity, but it’s unlikely to be prosecuted, presumably for the same reason that nobody is prosecuting X/Grok for its illegal production and distribution of child pornography: the Irish State is deep in the pockets of Big Tech and won’t stand up to it whatever crimes it commits.
Anyway, I have some recommendations. First, don’t use Google search. Second, if you do use Google search, then at least disable “sponsored” searches as these include fraudulent sites. There are various ways to do this but they depend on your browser and OS so you will have to find out. Finally, no tickets to Kilmainham Gaol are available from any third-party providers, so use the official site. The front page should look like this:
If it doesn’t look like that then you have landed in the wrong place and should leave.
Please don’t let this put you off visiting Kilmainham Gaol Museum. It’s an important part of Ireland’s story. It was, for example, where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed by firing squad. It is very busy, though, so you will almost certainly have to buy tickets in advance; a small number are released each morning but they go very quickly.
In the Dark 