Adwords Scam Alert

detected a possible fraud attempt from .cn site

[Scurramunga]

A friend of mine fowarded this to me seeking an opinion. Now I know most of you here are not going to fall for this scam. However for the sake of any unsuspecting newbies, or for the information of anybody conducting a google search on the topic, I thought I would post the following:

Dear 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 [adwords.google.com...] 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.

NOTE: The anchor text appears legit, however the URL which you are fowarded to is actually [a dot.cn domain]

[edited by: buckworks at 11:13 pm (utc) on April 10, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[vincevincevince]

There's been a lot of these recently going around. I've forwarded a number to Google who's only response is that they are 'blacklisting' them, i.e. if you use Google's anti-phishing protection you will be alerted to these false sites.

I guess the message from Google is essentially that even someone as large as they are is unable to get these sites taken down quickly.

[briggidere]

we had a ex clients account get in trouble with this to the tune of over $13,000 in a week.

Looking in the change history, they were doing weird stuff before whacking content bids up to $160 cpc in the last few days.

The ex client didn't spot it as they weren't looking at their account like we would have. It's one good way to get clients back though. Worked a treat.

Google spotted them as fraudulent (emailed us) and didn't charge the client in the end. Scary when you look at the figures and what they were doing there though.

[conor]

Got calls from clients on this too: As their Adwords run through our Adwords account we spotted the fraud immediatley !

[TravelSite]

The email is very convincing - its easy to be fooled by it.

It looks like an official email from Google, the return address / sender address appears official and the landing page is identical to the Google Adwords sign in page.

What's really interesting about this one is that its a HTML email that LOOKS like a plain text one - therefore its very easy to assume that the link is a plain text one, going to the address shown. Very sneaky.