The top result when you search for your water company might not be your water company

You want to pay an electricity bill. You type the utility's name into Google, click the first thing that appears, and land on a page carrying that utility's name and possibly its logo. You pay. Except the site belongs to a middleman you'd never heard of, there's a fee on top of the bill, and the money reaches the utility considerably later than you assume.

That's the scenario the FTC described on August 17 in an alert titled "Searching Online: Bill Pay Impersonators," published the same day it announced a settlement with the online bill-payment firm Doxo. Doxo and two of its co-founders, Steve Shivers and Roger Parks, will pay $2.1 million over allegations that they used search ads to pass the company off as the official payment channel for utilities, car loans and other bills - landing pages carrying other companies' names and sometimes their logos - then charged customers add-on fees.

The detail that does the real damage is what happened after payment. The FTC says Doxo charged the customer immediately but then, in many cases, printed a paper cheque and posted it to the biller, arriving days or sometimes weeks later. People had utilities shut off while believing they'd paid on time.

The habit worth building applies well beyond this one company: don't reach a payment page through a search result. Type the address from your paper bill or your account statement yourself, or use the app you already had installed. A paid ad can sit directly above the real thing and look identical, and a small "Sponsored" label is the only thing telling them apart.

If your searches keep landing somewhere you didn't intend, that's a different problem - Tendvane's "browser hijacked" wizard puts your homepage and default search engine back where you left them.