Google Phishing Emails - Update
Last week I posted a quick comment about a recent rash of Google Phishing Emails I have been receiving. I stated that everyone at some time or another has probably received a fake PayPal or Credit Card email stating to log into your account immediately or else it will be shut down or something like that. These are from the bad people who want your login information so they can buy stuff with your money. I was a bit confused why someone would want access to your Google Adwords account because anything you link to could be easily tracked down. One of my clients fell victim to this fraud and I'm still confused as to why.
My client had an ad group created for "Ringtones." His settings were adjusted to accept a $25,000 daily limit with each keyword set at $18.00 max CPC. The fraudster then bought dozens of ringtone related keywords. The puzzling part was the actual ad was jibberish and the desitination URL was an invalid domain. In fact, it was available to purchase. The fraudster was either testing something out or just had too much free time on his hands.
Either way, we worked with Google to fix everything, but the only thing the fraudster really did was waste several hours of time.
I'm not going to post screen shots of the ad or what everything looked like as I don't want to give this guy credit, but we did get the clients password changed and everything seems to be running smoothly now.
So... What did we learn? Change your passwords to something not easily guessed or figured out and most of all, never click on a link to log into your account from anyone! Actually go to the website and login. I would like to think that if your account is about to be shut off, the company would put some kind of message on the site once you logged in without having to click on any links within an email.
For your reference, below are copies of 3 different Google Spoof emails that I have received:
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Dear Google Adwords Customer, Your ads have stopped running because we were unable to process your billing information.
To activate your account and start running your ads, enter your billing information.
In order to activate your account and start running your ads, enter your billing information.
Pease sign into your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login, and update
your billing information.
Once your account is reactivated and your billing information has been processed,
any your ads and campaigns can begin running immediately on Google.
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This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
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Google Adwords Team
Dear Google AdWords Customer,
Your ads have stopped running because we were unable to process your billing information. We will reactivate you account after you update your billing information. In order to reactivate your account, please sign it to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login, and update your billing informatio
Dear AdWords Customer,
The ads in this account are not running. All other account activity has been stopped.
Any edits you make here will take effect only if you reactivate the account.
If you would like to reactivate your account, please sign in
to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login,
and update your billing information.
posted by Michael Roebuck @ 12:30 PM
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