According to Nick Johnston, a senior software engineer with Symantec, his colleagues in MessageLabs Intelligence tracked a new pharmaceutical spam campaign promoting a supposedly "Google-accredited" online pharmacy.
"This is obvious brand hijacking", he said, adding that Google does not host or approve any pharmacy sites.
Johnston reports that his team contacted Google about this, and a spokesperson responded with `Google has a track record of fighting similar types of scams, and we also recommend that users carefully review online offers that look too good to be true before entering any of their information.
The Symantec senior software engineer went on to say that the spam message contains text promoting a drug for preventing hair loss, and a link to a blog the spammer has set up on a popular free blogging site.
Anyone following this link, says Johnston, will be directed to the spammer's blog, containing spam-related content and links to the spammer's actual site.
This saga, however, is just one of more than 250 similar spam-created, claims Johnston in his latest security blog.
He notes that the spam blog's most recent entry has a randomised, irrelevant title ("gourmet"), and consists of text taken from a book or some other document, interspersed with an image and link.
The image, meanwhile, contains the Google logo with the two "o" letters replaced by differently-shaped tablets.
This, Johnston observes, is perhaps more plausible than it might seem due to Google's famous `doodles,' where Google changes its logo to mark holidays or even famous computer scientists like the late Edsger W. Dijkstra.
The senior security engineer says that this type of brand hijacking is a serious problem for well-known brands and can harm their reputation.
This, he adds, is because users might wrongly associate the nuisance factor of receiving such email with the brand.