"The ads were paid for by an outfit called Digital Eagle, which the transparency page says is an advertiser whose identity has been verified by Google."
OF COURSE they were verified by Google. Google verifies identity by accepting money. Give them money, and you're verified.
"Google representatives didn’t immediately respond to an email" Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email? I haven't seen a response from Google in more than a decade. It makes me wonder if all the phishing and spam I'm reporting even does anything.
Honestly, it's time for the world to move on from Google. They haven't been safe to use as a search engine for more than two years.
After clients had been sent to phishing sites by Google's ads, I decided to block these domains on all the networks I administer:
googlesyndication.com
googleadservices.com
googletagservices.com
googletagmanager.com
google-analytics.com