Should anyone receive an email similar to the following please beware as there appears to be a number of Fraudulent phishing emails that pretend to be from Google circulating at the moment:
“—— Forwarded Message
From: Google Adwords-noreply
Reply-To:
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 13:33:37 +0100
To:
Subject: Please Update Your Billing Information
————————
Dear Google AdWords Customer!
In order to update your billing information, please sign in
to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com , and update your
billing information. Your account will be reactivated as soon as you have
entered your payment details. Your ads will show immediately if you
decide to pay for clicks via credit or debit card. If you decide to pay
by direct debit, we may need to receive your signed debit authorization
before your ads start running, depending on your location. If you
choose bank transfer, your ads will show as soon as we receive your
first payment. (Payment options vary by location.)
Thank you for choosing AdWords. We look forward to providing you with
the most effective advertising available.
Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team
————————
This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message. If you
have any questions after following the steps above, please visit the
Google AdWords Help Center at
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8336=en_US to
find answers to frequently asked questions and a ‘contact us’ link near
the bottom of the page.”
————————
This email looks very genuine and it is easy to think this is the real deal. It appears to have come from Google but in reality the relpy to address is actually a normal email account. In the example above you can see the reply to email is [email protected]. The other way to tell is the destination URL contains “ork0r.cn” near the end.
This website now appears to be down, however these guys were smart in that they sent the email on the 22nd during the bank holiday weekend. This means that marketers and Google representatives would not have been available to aid clients in determining if this was genuine or not.
Should you have already updated these details you should contact your bank immediately.
You may also need to change your adwords log in details.