Adwords Fraud E-mail - Watch Out

[accelerator]

I know everyone probably gets loads of scam e-mails, but I haven't seen this Adwords one before, and if it wasn't for Firefox anti-phishing, I might have got caught out as per usual I was distracted watching TV whilst going through my e-mails. Just be on your guard folks.

Here's a screenshot of the fake login screen here, as detected by Firefox:

http://www.webref.eu/images/adwords-forgery.gif

The text of the e-mail was:

------STARTS-------

Dear Google AdWords Customer,

We were unable to process your payment.
Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
To prevent your ads from being suspended, please update your payment information.

Please sign in
to your account at Welcome to AdWords,
and update your payment information.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------ ENDS --------

[fizzbird]

I've had loads of these in the last few weeks and I agree with what you say about being nearly caught out. The only reason I was suspicious at first was that it went straight to my junkmail filter. Otherwise I might have fallen for it.

[tbp]

I get around 50 of these a day, and have reached the point where anything that says it's from Google gets deleted.

The emails are quite clever, as the wording is spot on, and they do seem very realistic until you mouseover the url.

One very worrying thing, is that they are only coming in on accounts I`ve used on adwords. I have over 30 email addresses, each for different domains, and have had 6 adwords accounts over the last year.

However, the emails only come in to the 6 domains i`ve used on adwords. In one case I used a domain as a login, but advertisised a different site with the adverts. Yet i`m getting these emails to the login domain.

Does really make me wonder if there has been a breach in Googles security! If people were trying addresses at random, then I would expect to get the emails to many of my domains, not just the ones i`ve only run adwords accounts on. They aren't getting it from the adwords adverts, as with the domain above which I only used as a login, and never ran any ad's pointing users to that site.

[fizzbird]

Originally Posted by tbp One very worrying thing, is that they are only coming in on accounts I`ve used on adwords. Does really make me wonder if there has been a breach in Googles security!

I haven't had this problem, the email addresses used are the ones I know are out there. However, given the number of people Google employ I suppose it's inevitable that security will be breached at some point?

Like any security, it's only as strong as the weakest link! More reason to be on one's guard I guess?

[tbp]

Like any security, it's only as strong as the weakest link! More reason to be on one's guard I guess?

Thats true, and if it was just a case of getting spam emails I wouldn't really care about it.

The trouble is that if someone can get email addresses only used for google adwords accounts, then they could well have credit card details as well. Google have to keep them somewhere as plain text to do the recurring billing. That does worry me!

[accelerator]

Part of the reason I almost got caught out is that by default Outlook 2007 doesn't display the real URL at the bottom left when you do the mouseover. Does anyone know how to make it start doing this?

[bills2big.com]

There are scam emails for practically everything these days, it's getting beyond a joke.

[tbp]

Part of the reason I almost got caught out is that by default Outlook 2007 doesn't display the real URL at the bottom left when you do the mouseover.

Not sure i`m afraid, as I only use Outlook Express and absolutely loathe Outlook!

I have a policy now that I just ignore any emails from Google and just look at the messages you get when you log into your account. I make sure that I log in each day so if there is something important I don't miss it.