Hi all, appreciate if someone can help here as Google are useless for this type of thing! Our MCC was either hacked or sabotaged by a previous employee. We believe he may have retained the log in details. This is hard to proce and Google say they cannot provide IPs for changes occured. We believe this person is in a certain country. can someone help?
Log in details have been changed once this was noticed. Dont know why the person would do this he left on good terms. But we think it was him as no evidence of malware etc been detected. He had access at admin level. No one else had the master log in besides myself. Can Google do a further investigation at IP address level? We know of his location now and just need proof of an IP from that country to take legal action.
It's too late for this now, but it's best to set up your MCC with employees having separate logins, and set them as authorized users for the account. This way, the history breaks things down by who did what.
We have employed that tactic now. All employees use their company emails to login. This all only happened a week ago. Is it still too late for Google to investigate deeper if they could? They did initialy mention no IP address info can be given out due to privacy laws etc. I don think they can go that deep personaly. The problem is if we do get an IP address can you prove it to be the actual person, with proxies and dynamic IPs these days?
Is it possible that someone could have responded to an Adwords phishing email? They're pretty damn sneaky.
You can report to the local legal enforcement unit and maybe secure a court warrant to compel the release of such information. Other than that I don't think such details would be given out easily.
Hi! Well they are able to get the IP addresses that logged to your account. This is very easy for them. In your account they have access to the username/ip address association that made every single change in your account. Maybe if you insist "nicely" by phone and with a little bit of patience, someone would agree to either give you the IP address or at least run a ip locator tool for that IP address without giving it (something like http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm or any other one).
Thanks for the advice so far guys..... The issue really is proving that these changes are really unauthorised, as they were made by my login details it gets very hard legaly to prove anything! Without solid legal proof I wont be able to get a court order and hence the reason why I think Google are not going to help me further. Even if I get IP location it will be a difficult case to prove. The costs to go ahead with legal action also with the associated time is also an issue!
I got this response from Google below, they do not under any conditions provide IP adress or location of access of your MCC! My advice to all be very careful with your logins. We have learnt our lesson! "This is a follow up call to our recent phone conversation. In response to your queries, I can confirm that we do not release information such as the IP address or location of users that access your AdWords account. Furthermore, if a person has been given your account login details and they login to the account using these login details even if against your wishes, Google would not be liable to cover the costs accrued as essentially this access was authorised when you gave the login information to that person. Google is a self managed programme and you have the power to manage all aspects of your account, you can change the login email and/or password at any time. If you believe you have given access information to a person whom you no longer wish to be able to access the account, we strongly recommend changing the login information" Cheers.......
Well if Google takes no reponsibility.....and they won't help you track down the culprate....thats B.S. Then any angry employee could possibly blackmail their former company? I mean since Google won't help you catch them after the fact. Right?
Google is covering their ass because if they released the info, you WOULD have proof of some sort that it wasn't you. However that would open up a huge can of worms for them with fraudulent claims daily. "I didn't make those changes, my girlfriends, brothers, mother did and she doesn't work here anymore, give me back my money..." It's smart of them to do this, sucks for the honest company, but they're willing to risk ticking off a couple honest people to deny a couple thousand dishonest ones.
Google seem to have a law of their own! They have a bad customer service level and even though they hold so much infomation on every single user they won't give it out! Only the big guns such as Viacom can challenge them......... Oh well I am glad this as come up as it will help prevent this problem for other inncocent advertisers. Cheers guys....