I checked my Amex card today and saw a nearly $1,000 charge from Google. I don't do much with PPC, maybe $20 a month in a campaign I don't even touch. I logged into my adwords account and I still can see the ad to the website! I've contacted google and checked the whois. The whois was PrivacyGuard.org but the nameservers went to a weird website. I checked the whois for that website and got the guys contact info with phone number. I'll let Google do their thing before investigating further and pressing charges. Good thing is that he lives in the US so I won't have a problem with some out of country laws. Any other advice?
contact your credit card company and say that this charge was unauthorized and do a charge back maybe
I'd be prepared to do a charegeback. Google won't look out for you, they will take care of themselves first and that means money in their pocket.
From what i've read online it seems that Google is pretty good about handling these issues. I'll do a chargeback as a last resort. I'd rather get it settled legit.
Seems there's been an increase in hacked accounts lately... http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1043152 and http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=970695 Sure they will, read what's happened to everyone else. Nice conspiracy theory but that's not how they handle this type of issue.
i would contact amex, my brother in law had a similar thing happen and the dismissed all fraudulent charges
I'm sure amex will refund the charges, but I'd rather let Google do the investigating. I've been digging deeper and found the offending site running a java script that was from another site. That had had public whois info listed.