Over the past few days, I've been getting quite a few spam mails from new google-type urls like google-anallytics.com [sic] and google-gb.com - some of these sites have been shut down, however some are still running, and I've reported the phishing sites to google. Usually, you get an email that says something like:

Hello,
Your Google Adwords Account has stopped running this morning.

Some of the ads have stopped running today (Monday, 4 January 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%. 

Click here to confirm that your account is up and running 100% at this time.

Please verify the status of your ads and notify us if you see any problems.

Please note: if you do not verify the status of your account and notify us if your ads do not appear online, we cannot help you.

I can see at a glance that its a phishing email, but others might not recognise the tell tale signs, so if you are concerned that you might have a phishing email, just look for the following top 5 signs that the email is suspect:

1. if the to: address is listed as 'undisclosed recipients'

2. if there are obvious spelling or grammar errors in the email, or odd characters

3. if there is a link to go to the login page. Generally genuine emails just say 'please log in to your adwords account to see the current status' without links in the sentence.

4. if there are missing images in html emails.

5. if the first line just says 'hello' rather than 'hello mr black'