If you received an email saying “Your AdWords Account has stopped running today” or “One of your Google AdWords Customer’s account has stopped running this morning” and if it is not addressed to you directly using your name or email or customer account number, its 100% a phishing scam email.

These emails wont have your email address in the “to” field, they are sent to undisclosed recipients and the email also wont have your account number.

They might have content something like this:

Your Google Adwords Account has stopped running this morning.
Some of the ads have stopped running today (Thursday, 4 February 2010, 04:34:08). We had encountered a number of problems with some of our servers that crashed this morning and at this time we cannot check to see what customer accounts are now running 100%.

Most of all, the links in these emails will take you to a fake login pages on domains like Google-ob.com, Google-ov.com, Google-kd.com, etc. and not Google.com – All real emails from Google AdWords will take you to Google.com only and not to some “Googlesomething.com” or “google.com.something.com”.

For those who are managing clients accounts: you might want to give a heads-up to your clients just to make sure they don’t fall prey to these phishing mails.

Sample copy of AdWords phishing emails:

So, before logging in to links from emails, do check the domain name always.
This applies to all emails and not just Google AdWords emails.