I have been getting some Google Adwords phishing emails lately, and aside from some poor formatting, they look fairly legitimate. Google posted some security tips the other day, and they’re not half bad, but I wanted to share an example.

Here is an email I received recently: (warning - don’t click the link in there!)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dear Google AdWords Customer,

Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
Please update your payment information.

Please sign in
to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login,
and update your billing information.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Google AdWords Team

Overall the phisher did a pretty good job of making the email look legitimate. However, the formatting was a little off, and the request was a little too vague.

Plus, no matter how well camouflaged the link is, it’s not that hard to spot that the link goes to a subdomain of 4e1w1.cn, which is definitely not Adwords!

But the dead giveaway is that this email came to my “@internetmarketingsucks.com” address I have listed on this blog, which is NOT an actual Adwords account email. So obviously it’s not from Adwords because Adwords does not know about this email address…

There’s a very important lesson - don’t mingle your actual Adwords email with a public one. Then you won’t have to really worry about phishing, since your Adwords account updates will only come to your semi-private email address.

For example, you might use josh@myawesomelookingfunblog.com as a public email on your blog, but then you would use josh.doe.adwords@myawesomelookingfunblog.com for your Adwords account.

Anyway…

Be careful out there.

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It is nearly impossible to stop your email address from getting spammed. Even if no one knows it, it will probably get spammed some day.

For emails that are made public, the amount of spam can be devastating. So if you’re going to display your email address, do it the smart way!

For me, the smart way is to use a little JavaScript to mask the email address. That link will take you to a site telling you how to do it, too.

That script is great because it displays a clickable email address to your site visitors, but it just displays some words and code to spam bots.

Why bother?

Well, writing your email address on a web page is just asking for spam. You could put your email in an image and display that, but it’s inconvenient for your visitors and these days, spam bots can decipher the image.

Writing your email like person AT yahoo DOT com can work, but again, it can be a pain for your visitors. Spam bots will surely pick up on that tactic too.

So do yourself a favor and use this JS method. Most people will have JavaScript enabled so you shouldn’t have a big problem with that.

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I remember the days of my very first personal email address. It was the only one I used, and I gave it out to all my friends and family. Then I started surfing the net… and giving out my email to any site promising a free special report that would make me lots and lots of money without any effort. It wasn’t long before I got twenty emails every day - enough to make me excited!

But the excitement wore off real fast, considering 90% of the emails were spam. As the years went by and the amount of spam increased to thousands of messages daily, I realized the importance of having a few yahoo and hotmail addresses. Those were for giving out to any websites, leaving my personal email for my personal business.

That method worked pretty well, but it was still a pain to register a bunch of @yahoo.com addresses, only to have them ruined by one spammer. But there weren’t any other options, especially when seemingly credible websites started selling out to spammers. (Add in human errors like pasting a bunch of emails into the “To” field instead of “BCC” and even good-intentioned business people could screw you over!)

But those days are slowly dissipating thanks to a new service called 10 Minute Mail. They let you sign-up for a new email address at the click of a button, and you get access to that email for 10 minutes before it self-destructs!

Why do something like that? Well, if you have been dabbling in internet marketing for a while, you know there are lots of shady characters lurking out there. If you’re still new, then just read this advice from 10 Minute Mail:

Maybe you want to sign up for a site which requires that you provide an e-mail address to send a validation e-mail to. And maybe you don’t want to give up your real e-mail address and end up on a bunch of spam lists. This is nice and disposable. And it’s free.

That sounds ideal. I’ve been using their service and so far it has performed flawlessly. Check it out at 10minutemail.com.

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