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Just Search Blog
Phishing is a fraudulent technique to acquire sensitive information such as identity theft, user names, passwords and credit card details. Such phishing attacks are typically carried out through scam emails / instant messaging software such as Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and ICQ, etc. These emails might appear to come from your bank, Microsoft, Social networking sites or even the biggest paid search advertising programmes such as Google Adwords.
To make a scam email look more convincing, scammers may add company logos or place links that will take you to a page which looks exactly like an official site. The trick is to check the web address of these links as this will help you to take the right steps. Recently, one of our clients reported a phishing /scam email to us, which appeared to be sent through Google Adwords. Here is a kind of message you will read when you open such email:
We stopped running your Google ads this morning (Monday, 22 March 2010, 07:09:50).
Dear AdWords Advertiser,
We encountered a number of issues when reviewing your ads this morning and so have stopped running them. We will review them again and make the necessary changes that will allow to run your ads without any further problems.
Click here to review your email and let us know if we made a mistake
We’ll often stop running your ads until we are able to make the necessary updates. As soon as we have made and saved the changes, your ads are automatically resubmitted to us for review.
Please note: If you do not verify the status of your Adwords account and notify us if your ads do not appear online, we cannot help you and your ads will stay offline for the next few days.
Of course, this scam message will accompany the official Google Adwords logo. To find out if it’s a genuine email from Google you can check all links for the actual domain, which will always be google.com and not in this case google-vm.com. You can do this by resting your mouse over the link which will reveal the web address you’ll be moved to once you click on such a link.
Google will never ask you any personal details nor will provide you with a link to log in to your Adwords account. It will only ask you to go to your Adwords account and do any necessary changes or updates. In case you feel that you’ve been a victim of such an email, contact your client manager immediately, run anti-malware software and change your Adwords account password.
Adil Jain
PPC Account Executive
Web Design, Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for the UK and World
Interesting to say the least, mine was a bit different here is what it said
Dear Adwords Member,
We hereby inform you that on the 26th of March a email change request
has been submitted to Google. Due to our security settings you are required to confirm or decline the validity of the request. To do so please visit the link bellow.
Adwords Site
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Sincerely,
Google Adwords Team
I received two of these from the same url but with different names. Scary thing is the email is seems legitimate or so I thought until I received another one within an hour. Of course, I wrote to Google adwords only to get a generic email stating thanks for contacting us blah blah blah but you can find answers here. Nothing to do with my concerns. I really do think Google is getting too big. Thanks for writing about this.