New Ad Group in Account. Not Made by Us.

[PayMePerClick]

Has anyone seen this happen in their account? Came in this morning and found a new ad group with all sorts of boat-related keywords sending people to a boat sales website. We have nothing to do with boats, and NEVER created this ad group. It spent 2k just overnight.

In the change history, it says it was created under our login.

Is this a Google error, or was our account hacked?

[RhinoFish]

I don't think we can answer that either.

My recommendation is -- have all users change their passwords asap, pause the "not ours" stuff, get on the phone with G.

Check user inventory to make sure new users haven't been created as well.

[netmeg]

Sounds to me like you've been hacked.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Sounds to me like you've been hacked.

It does have that ring to it, unfortunately.

Here are a couple of useful resources from the AdWords Help Center on this topic:

What do I do if I think someone's hacked in to my AdWords account? [adwords.google.com...]

What do I do if I receive a suspicious email claiming to be from AdWords? [adwords.google.com...]

have all users change their passwords asap

Agreed - and, to go a bit further, I'd suggest a password that is hard to guess or crack - perhaps with random letters and numbers, using both upper and lower case characters.

AWA

[PayMePerClick]

Thanks for the responses. All of these measures have been taken care of. We're pretty secure and aren't ignorant to the scams out there. We would never send out our passwords or account information, so I'm not sure how it happened.

Very frustrating since I know the destination URL/website that did this, but there's nothing I can do; no real contact info on the site (phone lines straight to automated mailbox, and 2 email addresses that surely won't respond to my demands for reimbursement/retribution).

[tommytx]

Sounds like a hack to me. Recently someone got my user and password and set up an account and spent $400 bucks. I reported it to google and they investigated and determined that it was a strange IP so they removed the charges and told me to change my password..

My only good experience with google...so far.