It's a cheap trick, no matter how you look at it, but it's having a much stronger impact than expected. Such a small subtlety can be the difference between a clean inbox and a spam bombardment, or worse. Every time a message appears offering special access or secret portals in the name of popular services like Google or Facebook, you need to study the URL very carefully...
"When in doubt, don't" is the basic recommendation of any administrator or advanced user when dealing with suspicious programs and links. As I've said on previous occasions, when traversing the territory of computer security, it's better to miss an opportunity than to invite disaster, because malware developers expect the opposite, that is, that the user clicks on the first link they see. That false sense of audacity leads to inboxes full of spam, phishing attacks, and a long etcetera. It's hard to believe that phishing is still so effective these days, but the truth is that much less is needed to deceive a user with their guard down. The latest reports come through those who use Google Analytics; however, I personally have seen examples inside Facebook and floating around Twitter.
Just one letter changed. It could be a 'g' or an 'e', and I figure there are still many substitutions to discover. Spam distributors are exploring symbols unknown to the average user and inserting them into their addresses as camouflage. That way they manage to create 'ɢoogle.com', 'samsunɡ.com', 'ɍacebook.com', 'appʟe.com', and other even more treacherous domains. In the specific case of 'ɢoogle.com', what the attacker did was replace the first g in the address with the symbol 'Latin Letter Small Capital G', or Unicode 0262. I think it would have been better to use Unicode 0261, the fake g that appears above in 'samsunɡ.com', but the spammer achieved his goal, which was to drive traffic to a kind of Russian campaign in favor of the newly elected US president Donald Trump.
In summary: be careful. No company of that level will contact you by email unless you specify it, and in many cases, it's not even part of their internal policy to communicate with users this way (announcements are made on blogs and other official portals).
