Someone is sending out email notices to domain name owners, telling them that their domain name has been suspended for “violation of the Google Inc. Abuse Policy”. The email then states that your website has been suspended. It appears to be a domain suspension notice from Google But it’s not.
Here’s a copy of one of the emails I received:
“Dear Sir/Madam,
The following domain names have been suspended for violation of the Google Inc. Abuse Policy:
Domain Name: idahoresorts.com
Registrar: Google Inc.
Registrant Name: Bill Hartzer
Multiple warnings were sent by Google Inc. Spam and Abuse Department to give you an opportunity to address the complaints we have received.
We did not receive a reply from you to these email warnings so we then attempted to contact you via telephone.
We had no choice but to suspend your domain name when you did not respond to our attempts to contact you.
Click here and download a copy of complaints we have received.
Please contact us for additional information regarding this notification.
Sincerely,
Google Inc.
Spam and Abuse Department
Abuse Department Hotline: 480-565-2700”
If you have received one of these emails, then you should ignore it or report it as spam. If you are using Gmail, where I received the email, then you should mark it as spam. This is an attempt to get you to click a link in the email, which then will go to a website that contains ads.
It looks to me like the page could have been live at one point, but is now showing ads, it’s a parked domain name now. I also took a look at the pages that have been indexed in Google for the domain name in question:
Google is showing that it’s a hacked site.
There are several reasons why I know that this is a fake or spam type of email:
— Google doesn’t generally send notices like this to domain owners. They sent emails like this in the past to website owners, but they will generally be related to a manual action that’s been taken against the site. This email is related to “violation of the Google Inc. Abuse Policy” which I don’t really think exists (it’s not named that)?
— Google won’t tell you to go to another site like debtspecialistcentre.com
— While Google does have a group working on web spam, they generally don’t call it the “Spam and Abuse Department”.
— Google would point you to the Google Search Console, formerly Google Webmaster Tools area of Google.com, not some other site. And certainly not a debt resolution site.
The reason why these scammers are sending out these emails is that they want you to scared about your website and click the link. Then, if you click the link they’ll most likely make money from clicking ads on their site.
