Today I received a call that I believe was trying to phish my google ads campaign. The call came from (252) 274-0231. Because my phone did not label it as a “possible spam” call, I answered.
(UPDATE) Concentrix has a contract with Google ads. They ended up being the real things. There are so many scams lately, that this seemed very much as a scam. Ultimately they helped me optimize my google ads campaigns and even merge them with the gs4 analytics.
The person identified himself as Marcus calling from Google Ads campaign. He said the call was to see how my new campaign had been going and if there was a way they could help me optimize the results to better perform based on the budget I had set. He said that he was not going to try to sell me anything and that his department was to better optimize my google ads campaign.
The English was not bad, the phone number he was calling from (252-274-0231) did not flag any suspicions, and he wasn’t asking any person questions. He actually knew some information about my ads campaign.
But something just did not feel right, something just felt suspicious, I was already thinking that this was some sort of phishing google ads campaign cal. So I went along with the call since I was not giving any person information, and he had not asked for any.
He mentioned how this call would be about 30 minutes or so, and he would be able to help me better target my buying audience, thereby helping me spend less for better results.
Here is the when I think the Phishing Scam reveals itself
Then he said he was going to send me an email with a clickable link, and asked I would not mind sharing my screen so he can help me optimize the account.
I had already read on Google’s website about suspicious google ads campaign calls.
So I hung up the call. No call back.
Now it gets a little complicated and suspicious
I receive an email from Mark Anthony Baynosa with an email address of [email protected], and he cc’d Richellet Chan [email protected].
This is the content of the email:
Mark Anthony Baynosa has invited you to join a video meeting on Google Meet.
meet.google.com/qvc-hmvn-pus
Or open Meet and enter this code: qvc-hmvn-pus
Dial in (audio only): (PH) +63 32 342 7701 PIN: 863 555 987 9826#
More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/qvc-hmvn-pus?pin=8635559879826
The phone is a Philippine phone number.
Neither one really say anything about working for google on their profiles, but they are using a google.com email address. As far as I can find, only google employees can use the domain email address.
Then I take a look at his email signature and it does not say he works for google, it reads:
Mark Anthony M. Baynosa
Google Ads Strategist
Concentrix, Supporting Google Ads Onboarding
So I call Concentrix and ask if they work with google ads. Another very suspicious and not very professional sounding person on the phone. He says that he is not sure, and that I can called the employee line – yet I called the main phone number on the concentric website.
Bottom line on the suspicious Google Ads Campaign Call
There really is no bottom line. I have very mixed signals. This is either a very elaborate phishing scam, or this is someone who works as a subcontractor for google ads or something. Hopefully with some help we can figure this out.
I did report the call to google, and hopefully they will give me an answer.
If you received a similar call from this Mark Anthony M. Baynosa (Markus) or from (252) 274-0231 – please leave a comment below.
What are they trying to Phish in your google account?
I’m sure there are some suspicious google ads campaign account calls that try to phish your finance information. Maybe this was a phishing call, or maybe I just passed up an opportunity to fine tune my google ads campaign. But I rather be safe than sorry, and this just felt very suspicious to me.
Just got one of these. While he was talking to me, I searched for the number, and turned up this page. I hung up on him—he just called back and left a voicemail saying “we got disconnected.”
It’s possible this is just an ad company trying to get new clients, but if so, impersonating a division of Google is not indicative of anyone I want to do business with.
I recently ended up talking to them. They are real. They are a subcontractor of google to help manage their ads campaign and help improve conversions. They even helped me structure my gs4 analytics and combine with the campaigns to get better results.
i have received multiple calls from that number on my google ads phone number, very annoying.
Today I received another call from a person called Rittika, calling from 404-978-8978.
She said she was calling from Google Ads in regards to my complaint of a scam call. (I have NEVER received such a quick response from Google….
Anyways she wanted to confirm my google ads account number, and did not even know how to get me to the google ads website. She told me to go to googleads.com, when in fact it’s ads.google.com.
then she went on to say that my google advertisers account has an account manager, and that he was the person who called me.
Just sounds so fishy, so suspicious…