Hola Folks!
Not that its of interest to most of the list, but I sometimes receive
dozens and dozens of eBay, Paypal, bank and other spams everyday trying
to get credit card info or passwords. I'm sure we all do.
However, tonight, I received one from google adsense which looked an
awful lot like a spam because it was so simple. Went through everything
on the email for links, headers, etc. and couldn't find anything fishy
about it.
The email was a warning not to use 'click on our ads' or 'click on
Google ads' wording within pages carrying Google ads as detected by
their adsense scanner. I had a few requests to click on google ads on
several pages. I went to the policies page and sure enough, one of the
paragraphs warns of this.
The email gave me 72 hours to correct it, so I removed all suggestions
for clicking Google ads to comply with their policy.
Their concern is 'artificial inflation' of responses to ads when people
just click and then back out....ok. Read through their page to make sure
there wasn't anything else I missed and it all complies now.
The weird thing was how simple the email was...usually, at least with
PayPal and eBay, even with the spammers, its all html'd up with a logo
and sometimes tables with info....but this page from Google had no logo,
just simple text with the sole html addition being some yellow
highlighted words, giving it the look of pure spam.
With the spammers, often there are misspelled words in the subject line
and in the text, or incorrect english syntax, plus highlighting their
links will show its NOT from who it says it is.
Doesn't matter how many of these spams I forward to their spoof address
for eBay and Paypal, they always send back canned emails saying yes, you
have been phished, its not from us, but if you clicked, etc..etc...but I
don't know if they actually GO AFTER these sites or at least try to shut
them down.
Would be nice if, for those who forward spam info, they actually DID
something about it, such as write back and say the site was now closed.
Just a nice touch to show they are TRYING to get rid of these spammers.
Anyway, it apparently was a legit Google email, simple, clean,
efficient...I like that...
--
Jerry Decker - http://www.keelynet.com
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Order out of Chaos - From an Art to a Science
