You need to renew your passport. You Google “passport renewal,” click the top result — it looks official, the reviews are glowing, the price is $89. It feels like the government.
Now the FTC says that feeling was the product. In October 2026, the Federal Trade Commission sued GovAssist LLC, Entry LLC and their owner Scott Zuckerman in the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, alleging a government-impersonation scheme that sold passport services to American travelers while pretending to be the federal government or affiliated with it. The complaint layers three classic fraud techniques on top of each other: deceptive paid search ads that put the scam sites at the top of Google, false promises about prices and delivery times, and — the one that matters most to this site’s readers — fake positive reviews used to make the whole operation look legitimate.
“Using paid Google search ads and landing pages to impersonate the government and target American travelers is illegal,” said Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Today’s action should serve as a stark warning that the FTC will pursue all bad actors participating in search advertising schemes that mislead consumers, distort competition, or otherwise violate the FTC Act.”
Whether you’re renewing a U.S. passport, applying for an EU travel authorization, or paying any “official-looking” fee online, this case is a field guide to the government-impersonation playbook. Here it is, tactic by tactic.
1. The case in 60 seconds: ads, a fake rating, and $89 that was really $148
Here is what the FTC’s October 2026 complaint alleges, straight from the agency’s announcement:
The defendants: GovAssist LLC, Entry LLC, and Scott Zuckerman — alleged to be the owner and sole member of both companies — running sites including GovAssist.com, Entry.com and IVS.us since at least October 2023.
The impersonation: The operation used paid Google search ads to position its websites where consumers would expect to find official government services. Searches like “apply for a new passport,” “get a new passport,” “how can I renew my passport,” “passport renewal,” and “passport renewal online” routinely returned the defendants’ pages as top sponsored results, leading consumers to believe they were dealing with the federal government or an authorized government-affiliated provider. The FTC says they were neither.
The false promises: The defendants allegedly promised they could directly issue U.S. passports. In many instances, consumers received only a completed passport application they could have obtained for free from the State Department website — then still had to pay the State Department separately.
The price switch: Ads claimed services “start at $89.” The FTC says the lowest price actually offered was $119 plus a $29 shipping fee — $148 total — with the additional State Department payment omitted or downplayed.
The impossible delivery: The defendants allegedly promised extra-fee expediting of 6–10 business days or even 3–4 business days. The FTC says these promises were false because they were faster than the fastest possible expedited service offered by the only source for passports — the U.S. State Department.
The fake reviews: The defendants “prominently tout on their websites that they have an ‘excellent rating’ based on numerous consumer reviews on Trustpilot,” the FTC says — “when in fact their rating is based on high numbers of fake positive reviews.”
The law: The FTC alleges violations of the FTC Act, the Impersonation Rule, and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. One more detail: Zuckerman ran this scheme while under an FTC order from a prior, unrelated case involving stalkerware (Support King LLC) and data privacy.
These are allegations at this stage; a court will decide the case. But the complaint is a public, line-by-line description of how the government-impersonation playbook actually works — and that description is useful whether or not you ever renew a U.S. passport.
2. The “sponsored result” trap: why the top of Google is the scammer’s favorite office
The single most important detail in the complaint is where the trap was set: paid Google ads at the very top of search results. People searching for “passport renewal” did not wander onto a shady site; Google placed the defendants’ pages exactly where the official State Department page would normally be, with the small “Sponsored” label doing the only honest work on the page.
This is the core mechanic of the modern impostor-website scam, and it works because our habits haven’t caught up with the advertising model:
Position = trust. Eye-tracking and click data have shown for years that users overwhelmingly click the first results. A “top sponsored result” inherits the trust of the official-looking position, not the scrutiny of the ad label.
Official-looking domains help. Names like GovAssist and Entry sound governmental enough to survive a glance. Combined with patriotic colors, seal-adjacent logos and form layouts that mirror real government applications, the site reads as “the government” on a 5-second skim.
Urgency does the rest. Travelers searching passport services are usually on a deadline — a trip in three weeks, a renewal that can’t wait. Urgency short-circuits verification; the FTC’s expedited-delivery claims (6–10 or 3–4 business days) were aimed squarely at that panic.
The defense is almost embarrassingly simple, and almost nobody uses it: scroll past the ads. The organic result for the U.S. State Department (travel.state.gov) sits below the sponsored block. On any “official service” search — passport, visa, tax, benefits — your eyes should start below the ad line. And type the real domain yourself: travel.state.gov for U.S. passports, gov.uk for UK services, the official portal for your country’s documents. Never navigate to the government through an ad.
3. The fake “excellent rating”: how Trustpilot stars made the scam look legitimate
The part of the case that belongs on this site’s front page: the FTC says the defendants used fake positive reviews on Trustpilot to prop up an “excellent rating” they displayed prominently on their own sites. The rating was the trust signal that made everything else — the ads, the $89 claim, the expedited promises — believable.
This is the exact mechanism behind review fraud, and it works the same way on Amazon, Google, and Trustpilot:
The rating is the verdict most people read. Almost nobody scrolls past the stars. A 4.8 with thousands of reviews ends the decision for most shoppers — which is why manipulators invest in manufacturing the stars rather than the product.
Volume drowns doubt. A handful of genuine one-star complaints from real victims disappears inside thousands of fake five-stars. The FTC’s complaint against a different company this same month — the Digital Forensics case we covered here recently — described the mirror image of the same tactic: manufacturing positives while suppressing negatives.
Platform badges travel. Once the fake rating exists, it gets quoted everywhere: on the scam site’s homepage, in its ads, in its sales copy. The trust signal built on one platform polishes every other touchpoint.
How to read a review profile like the FTC apparently did: ignore the aggregate score for a moment and look at the pattern — are the five-stars clustered in time, written in similar phrasing, from reviewers with one review each? Are the one-stars all telling the same story (charged twice, service never delivered)? On this site you can check a suspicious site’s trust signals with our website scam checker — and if a glowing review smells manufactured, paste the review text into our fake review checker to run it through the same kind of pattern analysis the FTC’s case describes from the enforcement side.
4. The price math that gives them away: $89 advertised, $148 actual — plus the government fee
The pricing deception in the complaint is a masterclass in how impostor services extract money, and it has two stages:
Stage 1 — the ad price is fiction. “Services start at $89” was the hook; the FTC says the lowest real price was $119 plus $29 shipping. The gap between the advertised number and the checkout number is not a mistake — it’s the funnel. By the time a consumer sees the real price, they’ve already entered personal details, uploaded documents, and invested ten minutes. Most people don’t walk away from a form they’ve nearly finished.
Stage 2 — the fee they don’t mention. The defendants allegedly omitted or downplayed that consumers would also have to pay the State Department when submitting the application — so some people didn’t understand they’d be charged a second time, by the actual government, for a service they thought they’d already bought. In many cases, remember, what the consumer received was only a filled-out application — a form available free on the State Department’s website.
The red flag for any official-looking service site: can you see the complete, final, all-in price before you hand over personal data? If the price grows at checkout, if shipping appears from nowhere, if a second payment to the real authority is buried in fine print — those are the same moves, whatever country the site claims to serve. Legitimate government portals list their fees openly, in full, before you begin.
5. Impossible promises: nobody can expedite what only the government issues
The complaint’s most checkable lie: 6–10 business-day or 3–4 business-day expedited passports. The FTC’s rebuttal is one sentence: those timelines were faster than the fastest possible expedited service offered by the only source for passports — the U.S. State Department. A private company cannot issue a U.S. passport, and it cannot beat the issuer’s own fastest lane.
This generalizes into the single best scam filter for any “official service” website:
Who is the sole issuer? Passports: the State Department (US), HMPO (UK), your national authority. Visas: the destination country’s consulate or its authorized system. Travel authorizations: the official ETIAS portal (EU), ESTA (US). If a private site promises to issue what only a government issues, it is lying.
What is the issuer’s fastest real timeline? Published openly on official sites. Any private company promising faster is selling fiction — the complaint shows exactly how that fiction is monetized (an “expedite” upsell on top of the base fee).
Can the company even touch your application? Many legitimate registered couriers exist (they hand-carry your documents to a passport agency). The line the FTC drew here: GovAssist allegedly sold the issuance itself, not courier help — and delivered a free form.
For European readers: the same pattern runs on fake ETIAS authorization sites and “fast-track passport” services across the EU. The issuer is always the state; the timeline is always the state’s timeline; anyone promising to beat it is the story’s villain, not its hero.
6. The detail that should chill every scam operator: he was already under an FTC order
One line in the complaint deserves its own section: Scott Zuckerman allegedly ran this scheme while subject to an FTC order from a prior case — Support King LLC, a stalkerware matter that ended in a final administrative order on data privacy. If proven, it means an operator already penalized by the FTC for one consumer-protection violation allegedly built a second, larger scheme in a different vertical.
Why this matters for you as a consumer: a polished website and an “excellent” rating tell you nothing about who stands behind them. The GovAssist sites looked like a professional travel-services company; the alleged operator was someone already on the FTC’s radar. This is why checking the entity matters as much as checking the site:
Look up the company behind the website (footer legal names, terms of service, “about us”).
Search the company name plus “FTC,” “lawsuit,” “complaint,” “scam,” “reviews.”
Check whether the “excellent rating” lives only on one review platform — and whether that platform’s reviews survive scrutiny (see section 3).
Regulators recycle their targets; scammers recycle their playbooks. A two-minute company-name search costs nothing and would have surfaced exactly the history the FTC is now litigating.
7. EU travelers: this playbook is coming for your documents too
The GovAssist case is American, but the impersonation playbook is jurisdiction-agnostic — and European travelers are squarely in its sights:
Fake ETIAS authorization sites. With Europe’s ETIAS travel authorization system rolling out, lookalike sites charging inflated fees for a simple application have already appeared — the same “official-looking site, inflated fee, free form” structure as the GovAssist allegations.
Fake “fast-track” passport and visa services operate in the UK, Germany, France and Spain, mimicking gov.uk-style branding or consulate aesthetics. The UK’s official passport service is HMPO via gov.uk; Germany’s is the Bürgeramt/Auswärtiges Amt route; anything promising to issue faster than the authority is the same lie the FTC just litigated.
EU law backs you. The EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive bans misleading actions and omissions — including fake reviews (the EU’s Omnibus Directive explicitly prohibits fake consumer reviews) and impersonation-style misleading marketing. Victims in the EU can report to their national consumer authority and the European Consumer Centre network; in the UK, Action Fraud.
The cross-border review problem. A fake Trustpilot rating assembled for a U.S. audience is visible to a traveler in Berlin or Lyon too. Review fraud doesn’t respect borders — your 30-second verification (section 8) works the same in euros as in dollars.
8. The 30-second check before you pay any official-looking site
Fold the FTC’s complaint into a routine you can run on any government-service website — passport, visa, tax, benefits, licensing:
Skip the ads. On the search results page, scroll past everything labeled “Sponsored” or “Ad.” Navigate to the government through its own domain, typed by you.
Check the domain. Official U.S. services end in .gov; UK in gov.uk; EU national services in their official domains. A .com selling “official” passport services is a private company by definition.
Read the reviews like an investigator. Star average means nothing — look for clustered five-stars, one-review reviewers, and one-stars all describing the same harm. Paste the review text into our fake review checker when a glowing review feels manufactured.
Verify the site itself. Run the domain through our website scam checker before entering personal or payment details — especially for sites you reached through an ad.
Price the whole thing. Demand the all-in total — including any fee owed to the actual government — before you submit personal data. If the number grows at checkout, leave.
Test the impossible promise. Ask: who is the sole issuer, and what is their fastest published timeline? If the site beats it, the site is lying.
Search the company name + “FTC / lawsuit / scam.” Two minutes. It would have found this exact history.
If you’ve already paid a site like this: contact your bank or card issuer about a chargeback, change any passwords you reused, preserve every receipt and screenshot, and report it — in the US to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, in the UK to Action Fraud, in the EU to your national consumer authority or the European Consumer Centre. Reports like these are what build cases like GovAssist.
FAQ
Q: Is GovAssist a real government service?
A: No — that is the FTC’s central allegation. The agency says GovAssist LLC and Entry LLC are private companies that impersonated the U.S. government through paid search ads to sell passport services, and that they were never the federal government nor an authorized government-affiliated provider.
Q: What did the FTC say about GovAssist’s reviews?
A: The FTC alleges the companies touted an “excellent rating” based on numerous Trustpilot reviews, “when in fact their rating is based on high numbers of fake positive reviews.”
Q: How much did GovAssist actually charge?
A: The FTC says ads claimed services “start at $89,” but the lowest actual price was $119 plus a $29 shipping fee ($148 total) — and consumers still had to pay the State Department separately when submitting their applications.
Q: Can a private website issue my passport faster than the government?
A: No. Only the issuing authority (the U.S. State Department, the UK’s HMPO, your national authority) can issue a passport, and no private company can beat the authority’s fastest published timeline. The FTC cited exactly this point in the GovAssist complaint.
Q: I found a site offering “official” travel documents — how do I check it?
A: Run the domain through our website scam checker, read its reviews like an investigator (clustered five-stars and one-review reviewers are red flags), and paste any suspicious review text into our fake review checker. Never reach a government service through a paid ad.
Sources
Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Sues Perpetrators of Government Impersonation Scheme Over Deceptive Ads, Misleading Promises and Fake Reviews,” press release, October 2026 — https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/10/ftc-sues-perpetrators-government-impersonation-scheme-over-deceptive-ads-misleading-promises-fake
Recording Law, “FTC Asks Whether Its Impersonation Rule Should Reach Platform Ad Tools,” October 2026 — https://www.recordinglaw.com/news/ftc-impersonation-rule-platform-ads-anprm/
Truth in Advertising, comment to the U.S. Department of State on registered passport couriers, September 4, 2026 — https://truthinadvertising.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/9_4_26-TINA-comment-to-Dept-of-State-re-registered-passport-couriers.pdf
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