I logged into my AdWords account today, which I usually don't do since I only have a 5 bucks a day ad running, and to my horror I saw that I owe Google $1,200 bucks. Someone had logged into my account and placed 2 campaigns for air travel, cheap tickets and other crap for $7,000 a day. Google did not catch it so now what? I emailed Google but I guess I could call them if I had a phone number Anybody else seen it?
I've heard of this happening a fair bit recently Good luck with the resolution, I've heard of them refunding people in the past, hope it goes well!
Sorry to hear that Mike - good luck with catching anyone who did this - do you have the url of the hacker's site?
How do you think it got hacked? Was your passwd compromised or did you not log off a public computer?
Thanks guys! I don't have a clue how they got into my account I never use public computers, only my laptop at home which nobody else uses but me. I regularly scan my computer for viruses and other stuff, so I am clueless. Seems like Google have a flaw. They should have caught it when someone goes from a budget of $5 a day to over $12,000 a day
After a lot of searching I finally found a place on their site where you could report that your "account has been compromised" I filled in the form but haven't heard back yet. Shouldn't they have some kind of warning system when an account goes from $5 a day to $12,000 a day? They could have emailed and asked if this is right or not Can't happen too often hopefully.
A client of mine had his Yahoo account hacked recently. He had someone run up a bill of $3200 on just one day. He called wanting to know what I did. Wasn't me, his account was hacked. A call to Yahoo and he was reimbursed. Turns out his brother, partner in the business, received an email seemingly from Yahoo. He replied to it (clicked a link) and unwittingly gave away his login information. Folks, don't ever click links in emails. Adwords, Yahoo, your bank, PayPal, you credit card company and all major companies never send emails that there's a problem with your account. They never ask for your login or other personal information. These are phising schemes. Delete them.
its really sad to here this we all will be waiting for the response u got from adwords team. a contact no for adwords team have already been posted, haven't u tried to contact them directly? anyways keep this thread updated it will be good if u post that link where we can fill form for these type of issues.
I don't have a clue how that thing can happen, since my deposit method is not to charge my card automatically.
This should be true for any of these institutions, but apparently some banks do send emails. In my case ING has sent me a couple of emails in the past. At first I though it was just another phishing email and hence i reported it to spamcop, only realize after taking a better look that it was addressing me by name. Turns out it was just one of their promotion advertising campaigns. With all these phishing emails I don't know what they were thinking when they sent it.
Promotions are OK. But never, never, ever click a link inside an email that asks to login to your account in order to "fix some problem" or any other reason. No bank I know of will do this. Neither will PayPal, Adwords or other similar services. You can usually tell too from the link. Often, the URL is nothing close to the service. Other times, they try to fool you with a URL that is close. For example, instead of adwords.google.com, it will be adwords.g00gle.com. Also, note the http part in the URL bar when using those services. There will be an S after http which stands for secure. Phising schemes may not have that S.
Here's the link for reporting a hacked site: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/request.py?display=form&contact_type=hacked I tried calling but couldn't get hold of anybody and I haven't heard anything from the report I did online.
That sounds like a nightmare and thanks for sharing your story and making us aware of this issue. Hopefully Google will give a good resolution to matter All the best