Google Toolbar PPC Spam
This is an interesting spam email I received recently, from an ip address (125.42.36.225) registered to China Network Communications Group Corporation, No.156,Fu-Xing-Men-Nei Street, Beijing 100031 and the email address helolonihao@sina.com.cn, offering me a “letter from firefox:”
From: “a letter from firefox”
Subject: [spam] a mail from firefoxwelcome to download firefox,It’s free and easy to use.Join the millions of people worldwide enjoying a better Web experience.please click the url to download it
The link itself is extremely complicated; it encodes two different Google PPC actions:
- Register a Google adsense click with publisher id ca-ref-pub-1379698615564904
- Takes the clicker of the ad to a referer page for the Google adsense / firefox bundle
It’s an interesting idea–using an email spam campaign to generate google clicks. I wonder if the Chinese spammer involved here is being naive, as Google should easily determine, from the lack of a referer field among other things, that the click is invalid.
| This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 8:50 pm and is tagged with china network communications, network communications group, google adsense, referer field, email spam, spam email, publisher id, google, group corporation, mail, better web, web experience, clicker, firefox, ppc, beijing, email address, ip address. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
For people using a webmail, referer field will not be empty.
Breaking news: Spammers are idiots!
Something tells me that that particular account isn’t going to last long…