• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 23, 2010

A Google AdWords phishing attempt appears to have resurfaced, according to a Google spokesperson. The hackers began sending out the fake email this week asking people to login and update their AdWords account.

An AdWords user who asked for anonymity received the email. The person opened the Google AdWords account in June 2009, but closed it the following September after spending a total of $68.56.

The fake email looks as if it came from Google.

The email reads:

Hello,

Your Google Adwords Account has stopped running this morning.

Some of the ads have stopped running today (Thursday, 22 April 2010). If you want to get your ad back up and running you need to optimize the campaign to improve the CTR. The link below has some helpful tips, but, in a nutshell, you need to look at your keywords and your ad text. Make sure your keywords are jighly relevant and then make sure that each keyword in the ad group makes sense in terms of the ad text associated with this ad group (usually this means you need to create more ad groups with a smaller number of keywords). Having a tight connection between keywords and ad text helps improve CTR, which should fix your problem.

Notice the misspelling in the word "jighly," which should read "highly" just prior to the word "relevant." The email notice also uses language that Google would not suggest to marketers using AdWords that they need to "Make sure your keywords are jighly relevant and then make sure that each keyword in the ad group makes sense in terms of the ad text associated with this ad group (usually this means you need to create more ad groups with a smaller number of keywords)."

The email includes several links. If you click on one of them the information goes to an unauthorized individual. It's not the first time that people have received these types of emails. Similar ones went out in 2008.