It could be for the following reasons;
1) They artificially generated searches, which happens quite a lot with scams because they want to make it appear that there is a lot going on.
2) There have been some popular news channels or tv shows covering this scam, which generally makes people curious and search for it as result.
It has been on national tv here not that long ago, so it wouldn't really surprise me if it generated a decent chunk of searches for them. The victims had one thing in common, they all had the iq of a donkey.