Don’t Get Hooked by the Google Adwords Phishing Emails Going Around

Posted May 13, 2008

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.

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

Filed under: This sucks

Brainfox - A Total Scam

Posted April 30, 2007

Comments(2)

brainfox logo banner

Have you ever ventured outside the realms of Google and Yahoo in search of cheaper Pay-Per-Click (PPC) traffic?

If so, you may have used places such as 7Search, Kanoodle, and Brainfox.

I’ve used all of them, and while none will be overtaking Google anytime soon, hopefully one will get shut down. And that one is Brainfox.

I could be wrong, but I think it is a total scam. All my dealings with them have been fishy. Luckily their minimum deposit is $10, so I’ve never lost a lot, but it’s kind of annoying to say the least.

Last time I used them, after I made my deposit, I burnt through my budget of $10 overnight. How did I get 1000 clicks overnight? With the keywords and bids I entered, that should not have happened. (It never happened in AdWords or Overture and those search engines have a tad bit more traffic…)

Hmm…

So I checked my reports to see where the traffic was going. The keywords showed about 50 cents worth of clicks, yet all my money was gone! At first I thought it was a reporting glitch, but I kept checking back, and the stats were the same. It seems that the real stats don’t come till a month later. What good is that?

Still skeptical, I searched the net for some Brainfox reviews. Too bad I didn’t do this a while ago - just look at these results!