I logged in to Gmail this morning to discover that a large number of bounced emails from email addresses I don’t know, in response to an email that I never sent.
It was a fake AdWords email asking these strangers to click on links to modify their AdWords account details. But when you hover over the links, they point to a different website!
So is this one step worse than the original phishing? This time, someone ELSE’s email address (i.e. mine) is being used. Someone even replied to me to ask what’s going on as he never had an AdWords account. I even received an autoresponder from a British MP!!! This is getting out of hand.
I reported all the bounced/autoresponded emails to Google’s phishing team already. I hope they won’t go fishing on this one…
The worst that can happen, I suppose, is Google decides to suspend my email address or I get some hate mail from these unintended recipients. Tomorrow my exams begin and that’s all I care about now. One thing at a time. No point getting upset as it won’t help anything.
[Update: After checking my Sent folder, It appears my Gmail account had been broken into at 5.27pm yesterday, beginning with a ‘test’ message sent to an email address with a Russian domain, and from 12.17am today, a series of fake AdWords emails were sent. This is terrible! I have changed my password and also reported the first ‘test’ email to Google.]