The Federal government has come good with one of the promises that is to introduce mandatory Internet filtering. They want to introduce what's called a "clean" feed. People will be able to opt out. But will it actually solve the problem?

A US federal grand jury in Detroit on the 3rd of January, 2008, indicted 11 people over a wide ranging international fraud. The people included: several Americans, a Russian and a man with Canadian and Hong Kong citizenship. The fraud involved spamming, sending out millions of messages in a "pump and dump" scheme.

Over the last couple of years a number of people have been caught out by "Renewal Notices" for Australian .com.au domain names being sent out. Some of our customers lost their .com.au domain names because they paid a "renewal notice". The company took the money but soon after cashing the cheque went belly up. The result was that the domain name was not renewed and it lapsed. The flow-on was that the client's website went off air.

Spam used to just a nuisance. A little bit of junk email here and there. Hit delete and forget it. Now it is turning into a major headache. Some spam contains viruses. A lot is just plain fraud. The fraud ranges from spam proporting to be from your bank asking you to click a fake link to supply your net banking login and password, to the Nigerian scams, to advertising products that have doubtful claims.

We recently received an email asking us to to update our Google AdWords. This is clearly a phishing scam that has nothing to do with Google. This makes a change from the regular banking or eBay ones we get.

The link says http://adwords.google.com/select/login while it really points to http://www.adwords.google.com.0lks.cn/select/Login. Note the extra bit in the URL.

Don't get caught out.

The message reads below.

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This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
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Dear Google AdWords Customer,
We were unable to process your payment.
Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
To prevent your ads from being suspended, please update your payment information.
Please sign in
to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login,
and update your payment information.