The latest phishing scam now showing in your inbox is a rather convincing and confusing email seemingly from Google Adwords. This one was telling me that my account was about to be deactivated if I didn't login and "renew" it.
I have seen several different ones like this in the past couple of weeks. As usual, it really looks like an email you would see from Google. I asked Joe Laratro if he had seen them, and he said that several of his clients had forwarded similar messages to him asking if they were real.
Besides the fact that Google would not send an email with the greeting "Dear Advertiser" (their emails are personalized with your name & account #) they also would not be deactivating your account or require a renewal.
The easiest and quickest way to determine if an email is authentic is to mouse over the link and check the website. If the destination link is not google.com (or the url of whoever is supposed to be sending you the email) then it is fake. Another sure give away is .exe in the link, which means it is an execution file and a virus would download upon clicking. Apparently the goal of this latest email scam is to try and get you to "login" to your Google Adwords account thereby giving the scammers your user name and password.
The best way to determine the validity of any email is to call the company to verify if it was them sending it.
If you by chance fall for this scam and try to log in to your account, IMMEDIATELY log in yourself and change both your user name and password.
I am calling out email service providers to set up better methods of monitoring and preventing these types of emails from making it to our inboxes. And I implore ICANN to disallow registration of misleading domains. So many problems could be prevented if some of the larger internet providers would form a plan and take action!
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