It is becoming rampant for scammers to try and steal your adwords account so they can lock you out, set up and run campaigns on your dime and all with it taking sometimes months for Google to fix the issue. It’s a known problem and unfortunately emails are getting better and better from scammers that seem pretty legit.
I just received one and wanted to share my process for detecting scammers. This is a little in depth and just one of these checks will usually reveal they are a scam but I’d like to be thorough in the hopes that someone will be helped out.
Analyzing The Scammers Email
First here’s the email I got from the scammer Nora Jane:
In analyzing this email there are a few red flags:
- Bad grammar: Nobody in the US would say $120.000 as a budget. What is it Nora $120 or $120,000?
- Scammers will sometimes go with praise to make you feel like they really want to work with you. I think we are a pretty good digital marketing company but “we highly value your companies expertise..” No you don’t. You’re looking to hire us or someone else. There is no way you already value us. Nobody hires with: “I highly value you already, so can you tell me what your plans would be at our company and your future?”
- Las this is probably nit-picky but them saying they want to run a google ads campaign and then putting [google ads] is a dead giveaway. The only reason to differentiate what the ads are would be if you have specific needs like video ads on youtube, LSA for local services, adwords, display etc. Saying google ads really is just saying: “We want you to run google ads for us on google ads”.
Ok so even though the emails a giveaway, lets assume the email was better written. Let’s move on to researching the person:
Who is the Adwords Scammer?
Nora Jane is the person sending the email. First I checked what actual email she was sending from. Looking into it her email came from redfinestate.com. I checked and you guessed it, there is nothing on that web page. Now you could say that some companies have different email suffixes to avoid spam but I also did a quick search to see what suffixes the real RedFin uses:
So even though the address is the right corporate address, the logo is correct and the position seems legit, you can generally spot a scammer if their email doesn’t match up. In the past a lot of scammers would just use gmail but then people got wise so they now have started registering domains that are close to or seem legit like redfinestate.com.
So let’s say that you aren’t sure if the email is legit or not. Now it’s time to dig a little deeper.
Check the Scammers Domain Registar
I did a reverse lookup on the domain that the Scammer is using. You can do this by doing any kind of who is search on google. I just typed “who owns this domain” into google and used godaddy’s.
You’ll see that it’s owned by someone with a gmail account and it also is mostly in another language. Probably not a company in Seattle.
OK last check I wanted to do was to see if Nora Jane had a profile on LinkedIn. Someone in her position would for sure have a profile even if it wasn’t constantly updated. So doing a quick LinkedIn search I found the following:
Looks like Nora Jane doesn’t have a legit profile or any other way to verify it’s really her or that she’s really and employee at RedFin.
I could do more research but I think this is plenty.
What Were the Scammers After?
OK so I can’t finish off this blog without explaining what they actually wanted. If you go back to the email you’ll see they wanted my adwords email so they can add it as a user and I can analyze their account.
So there are all kinds of reasons why a company would never add a potential vendor as a user on their account but putting that aside what would happen is they would have sent a very convincing login page to google adwords as an invite.
These would of course look like a legit adwords invite but would actually be set up to steal my gmail login.
Obviously they would then log into my gmail account, change the password, my phone number and then start trying to get into all my other accounts associated with my email. Yikes. This is also why at Raptor we have separate emails only for adwords.
But even if you use different emails for adwords, they can still get into your ad account and set up campaigns for themselves.
You won’t just lose money, you may have your account banned since they won’t care about following google’s policies.
Summary
So be careful. People are generally decent and good, but scammers aren’t people. They are individuals who long ago decided they didn’t care what they had to do to make money and will steal everything they can from you. Sad but true.
