Timberline Interactive

This morning our spam filters and those of some of our clients were clogged with a number of bogus emails purporting to be from Google AdWords. Bearing the subject line "Please Re-activate your account," they resemble some actual billing-info alerts from Google, but they are pure phishing scams -- sent to random email addresses and meant to get receivers to cough up their credit card info.

The sender email address and the links are spoofed to make them appear to be Google addresses. When you "view source" you'll see the links actually point to a "Adwords.Google.com" subdomain on the Chinese domain hki045.cn, or other non-Google domain. If you receive similar messages, IGNORE AND DELETE THEM! DO NOT CLICK THROUGH.

The copy of one of the emails we received is as follows:

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Dear Google Adwords Customer,

Your ads have stopped running because we were unable to process your billing information.
To activate your account and start running your ads, enter your billing information.

In order to activate your account and start running your ads, enter your billing information.
Pease sign into your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login, and update
your billing information.

Once your account is reactivated and your billing information has been processed,
any your ads and campaigns can begin running immediately on Google.

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This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

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Google Adwords Team

The Google Analytics problem we reported on Jan 15 has been resolved by Google engineers, and accounts are now collectly tracking Google AdWords traffic.

UPDATE: The problem has been resolved

Since January 9, Google Analytics has been experiencing technical problems capturing traffic data coming from Google AdWords cpc platform.

While there is no official word yet on the cause of the problem, we are in touch with Google Tech Support, and Google engineers are working on it. Our initial suspicion is that the situation is connected with Auto-Tagging, a setting that enables advertisers to pass campaign information into Analytics without manually tagging their links with tracking information.

The problem does not affect the customer’s experience. Customers coming from paid Google ads are still able to place orders, and if you’re using Google Adwords conversion tracking, orders are still being tracked as conversions within the AdWords platform.If your Google ads are manually tagged using Conversion Ruler, Atlas, Omniture or other third-party tracking tags, you’ll be unaffected.

The problem is apparently affecting a number of other sites. Here is a thread devoted to the topic at Google Groups:

We will keep you updated as soon as we have more information!