Kirk here. 渡米する日本人に必読。 I’d like to share some information about an issue that’s not limited to Kumamoto but that I think is relevant to any person in Kumamoto who either is not an American citizen or has a family member that is not an American citizen but needs to travel to the U.S. As you may know, persons who are not native citizens need to apply for a visa online via ESTA. Here’s the address of a U.S. government site where you can do that:
But, it has come to my attention that searching for “アメリカ ビサ” (America visa) in Japanese via Google’s search engine, produces results with ads from scam sites that charge much more than the normal fee. These results appear at the top of the search results as “Sponsored” results. Google should never serve up such trash. In fact, here’s an English article about how Google has been trying to weed out such scam sites:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46316655
My impression is that English-language searches are much less likely to produce such ads but, as of today at least, they come up regularly in Japanese.
I’ve written to Google using a form they have to submit complaints about such ads (search for “Google ads inappropriate report” or similar words in Japanese). Hopefully, this will have some effect. In the meantime, be careful.