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Pay up or we’ll make Google ban your ads

• sankalp_sans 7y ago
  A client I worked with long back received a similar threat, and she replied "I don't have $10000 like you requested, I do have $20; would that buy you a nice coffee wherever you live?" The blackmailer(s) responded with a single alphabet "k" and it was sorted within hours of the first email.
• hmage 7y ago
  with google everything is sunshine and rainbows until the moment you expect to get paid by google then they will use every excuse not to pay you 1. suddenly you're frauding ... you fix that ... 2. suddenly you don't have proper paperwork ... you fix that ... 3. prove that you're a legal business ... you fix that ... 4. we found inconsistencies in your paperwork, we will hold the money until you prove to us that those inconsistencies are minor ... you fix that ... 5. your bank has refused our payment (bank then says they never even seen the money), please try a different bank ... you fix that ... 6. with so much time has passed, we will not send you the money right now and will bundle up the payment with the upcoming billing cycle ... you wait for that ... 7. GOTO 1
• skymt 7y ago
  The fascinating thing here is that Google's systems are required to make a judgement of intent. Is this ad fraud ordinary fraud that's intended to increase payouts, or is it intended to be caught so the account is suspended? From the scammer's perspective, there's no reason not to play both sides: test fraud patterns to see if they're detected, and when they get caught just redirect the bots towards extortion victims. No matter how well Google's detection system works, the scammer gets paid.
  • duxup 7y ago
    Yeah if one scam doesn't work... now you've got a known good weapon. Google's willingness to shut down a lot of things on what seem like a very surface level fingerprinting means it's pretty rock solid to predict what will happen.
  • dessant 7y ago
    Google either doesn't care about intent, or their systems have consistently bad judgment. I've lost count of the horror stories about indie bloggers getting a ban from AdSense when it was time to receive their first check, and being offered no meaningful way to appeal the ban.
    • burnte 7y ago
      Yeah, that happened to me 15 years ago. Just crossed the $100 payout limit and suddenly, FRAUD! What ticks me off the most is if they have the ability to detect and block fraud, then why block accounts? Why the death penalty? Just don't pay out fraudulent clicks and terminate repeat offenders, rather kill the account on the first blush with no appeal.
      • settsu 7y ago
        > if they have the ability to detect and block fraud, then why block accounts? To protect their business by protecting their reputation. The scale of Google's advertising business(es) means that a loss in revenue from poor public perception of their ads is likely to be far more than a few thousand small ad buyers (those spending <US$5000/mo) getting cut off, which would barely register as a rounding error (<0.1% of just AdWords revenue alone.)
        • lonelappde 7y ago
          How is perception affected by not-paying suspect accounts but not banning them either? The public doesn't see the clickfraud
          • settsu 7y ago
            They could be shadow banning them or they could be continuing to allow them to operate in service of their algorithms. The public doesn’t see clickfraud but they also don’t see headlines about Google ads having a fraud problem. A rare anecdote of Joe Schmo not getting his 97.54 payout is effectively meaningless.
        • 7y ago
  • KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
    They don't have to judge intent, just remove the traffic without enforcing a punishment.
    • skymt 7y ago
      The policy that the system is intended to implement requires suspending customer accounts for detected fraud but not for cases of sabotage, so it needs to judge intent until the policy is changed. I would imagine that the current policy was designed under the assumption that traditional click fraud would be the dominant form of fraud and so making it more difficult would be the highest priority. Simply removing detected fraudulent traffic without enforcing a ban would make it easier to test and iterate on fraud bots without burning as many accounts. I don't think there's an easy answer.
  • the_matrix 7y ago
    Doesn't your hosting platform (Wordpress/Blogger/AWS/etc.) help identify the spam bots and stop them in the first place?
    • pier25 7y ago
      AFAIK you don't need to spam the actual hosting platform since you can extract the embed code of the ad.
  • Mirioron 7y ago
    Well, the difference is that extorting someone is a lot more illegal in a lot more countries than running not farms. Extradition usually requires that whatever a person is accused of is a crime in both countries, which makes extortion a bigger risk for the scammers.
  • cirno 7y ago
    It's an act of duplicity. Google wants you to believe both that it can detect a website owner doing bad things (blackhat SEO, click fraud on ads on their site to earn more money, etc), yet simultaneously that they can catch any bad actors faking those things to damage you (negative SEO, click fraud to terminate your own accounts, etc) That obviously isn't possible. Google cannot determine the intent behind anonymized actions. They just want you to believe that they can in order to discourage people from trying to game the system. I've heard of Twitter and YouTube accounts being suspended for buying followers, but anyone with $5 can send tens of thousands of fake followers at anyone's account. The only real solution these services have is to silently ignore the faked traffic whenever they observe it. Anything else can be gamed from either side.
  • incompatible 7y ago
    Yes, and if a somebody is offering ad-clicking as a service, how is Google supposed to know who paid for the clicking?
• scarface74 7y ago
  If the entire third party ad supplier web blew up tomorrow nothing of value would be loss.
• notlukesky 7y ago
  I assume it will be a cost benefit analysis for unfortunate victims.
  • stri8ed 7y ago
    Putting up a captcha would be another option.
    • gruez 7y ago
      captcha on what, the site? since there's basically nothing authenticating the site to the adsense iframe/script, can't the attacker serve a cached version locally?
      • stri8ed 7y ago
        Are you sure there is no authentication? https://www.seroundtable.com/google-adsense-verify-sites-26596.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-adsense-verify-sites-265...
        • throwaway2048 7y ago
          That has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, and would do nothing to prevent a malicious ad clickbot
          • stri8ed 7y ago
            To actually enforce the policy described in that link, would require authenticating websites when rendering ads. Otherwise, one could just embed an ad from a different domain, and easily defeat this process.
            • gruez 7y ago
              I'm not sure why the parent (throwaway2048) is getting downvoted over this. He's correct. The attack is as follows: You want to attack (send fake traffic to) example.com, but example.com has implemented a captcha system (think cloudflare interstitial). If you directed your bots to visit example.com, they'd have to solve the captcha to view the ads. However, there's nothing stopping you from solving the captcha once, getting the page source, and serving that to your bots. This works because example.com doesn't serve any ads directly, it only embeds a <script> or <iframe> element to adsense. Since the bots are under your control, it's trivial to set up the redirection (eg. hosts file or HTTP proxy). HTTPS isn't a problem either because you can MITMing yourself with a self signed certificate, which is not a problem either as you can get your bots to trust that certificate. From the perspective of the adsense script, it's impossible to tell whether the bot is visiting the real example.com or a fake version, since the browser is under the attacker's control. The only way to mitigate this attack would be some sort of one time use token that's generated server-side by example.com, and authenticated by adsense each time it tries to display an ad, which I doubt adsense supports.
• vivekd 7y ago
  Hooefully this willnget Google to take appeals from suspensions more seriously
  • vezycash 7y ago
    No. Their MO has been to remedy only those that get high publicity.
• eyegor 7y ago
  If this doesn't lead to a change in googles fraud policies, I'd bet this will be the next viral scam. It's a classic protection racket, and requires far less technical ability than ransomware. Renting out botnets is big business.
• vorpalhex 7y ago
  Funny story, Twitch.tv actually has a similar problem and they seemingly have solved it. On Twitch, "Followers" is a tracked and important metric for streamers (publishers). Therefore there's obviously a lot of benefit to buying fake bot followers and inflating your count. However, sometimes misguided fans of streamers will buy bot followers for them intending to be helpful (or even to spam them with inappropriately named followers). From Twitch.tv's perspective, tracking down who issued the bot followers is of paramount importance since they have an interest in preventing gaming of the system without catching innocent streamers in the crossfire. Twitch actually maintains a help page on what to do when you're being spammed by followers, and it includes a statement that they won't punish people who haven't paid for spam. In my experience, whatever mechanisms they're using under the hood seem to be reasonably effective - I have yet to see someone incorrectly banned for this.
  • legohead 7y ago
    Where have you heard/read about this? I've seen cases where twitch streamers have super obvious bots watching, literally thousands of them, and Twitch did nothing.
    • tmpz22 7y ago
      It used to be a very large problem for the 2007scape streamers, I imagine it was solved with a mix of legally prosecuting serious offenders via de-anonymizing the bot networks, as well as a tighter feedback loop of reporting and banning them - effectively making it more of a hassle to setup than its worth, which is saying a lot because the types of people doing those activities have A LOT of free time.
      • komali2 7y ago
        How could they legally prosecute them? What laws were broken?
        • kick 7y ago
          EULAs are legally-binding in the United States, and the Federal government is very happy to murder people under CFAA violations.
• asdasdasdasdwd 7y ago
  I wonder if they sold clicks before. Interesting way to pivot their "business".
• heisenbit 7y ago
  In the real world protection rackets are a stable business. You either pay up and are protected or your business gets messed up. No sane criminal would xerox the client list, split from the boss and also try to extort money - it is unhealthy as the turf will be defended. In the online world there is no concept of local. You can't protect your clients. But then, why should clients pay up - there is an infinite supply of copycats.
  • lifeisstillgood 7y ago
    I cannot upvote this enough - a deep insight into the problem.
  • andybak 7y ago
    So would a valid defence strategy be for a white or gray hat to send out millions of these threats (maybe linked to an invalid payment method so it became impossible to pay up). Everyone would get so many of them that the "genuine" threats would get lost among the fake ones. Alternatively somebody uses the same technique to send massive amounts of fake Adsense traffic to multiple businesses without any warning thus forcing Google to improve their customer service or validation algorithms...
    • inetknght 7y ago
      > Everyone would get so many of them that the "genuine" threats would get lost among the fake ones. So the internet will turn into the United States Postal Service then w.r.t. advertisements vs legitimate correspondence?
      • saagarjha 7y ago
        Surely in many people’s spam folders this is already the case?
    • manmal 7y ago
      I can already see my spam folder being made up of 100% extortions and threats of varying severity. A grizzly thought.
• matsemann 7y ago
  > We have a help center ... There’s also a form ... But good luck getting hold of a real human to explain the situation to.
  • CryptoBanker 7y ago
    That's just Google in general. Apparently not a single human being still works in their support department. All androids I hear...
• pjc50 7y ago
  I've been saying for a while that the problem with micropayments is microfraud, and this just adds to that.
• freepor 7y ago
  I’d love to see these extortionists, senior citizen scammers, and ransomware authors who destroy lives from the comforts of anonymity dragged into a public square and shot in the stomach on national television.
• yellow_lead 7y ago
  In my opinion, the parallel is Black hat seo. The parallel solution is disavowment via Google webmaster console. That concept could work here.
• ImpressiveWebs 7y ago
  I don’t understand: Why can’t Google just count those clicks as invalid and keep the AdSense running with no ban? If Google has the ability to detect fraudulent clicks, then there is no reason to ever ban any website for AdSense fraud.
  • rstupek 7y ago
    That assumes google can actually detect all fraudulent clicks, no?
  • fwip 7y ago
    If Google's fraud-detection isn't 100% accurate (and I'm sure it's not), then simply removing detected fraud disadvantages those who don't have any fraudulent clicks.
  • vidarh 7y ago
    In that case you've removed the risk of iterating to try to find a way to get past their checks.
  • JangoSteve 7y ago
    I'm going to make a guess here from my own unrelated experience trying to debug problems in live systems. It is often much easier to detect that there is _some_ unusual activity present than it is to categorically define exactly which activity is legitimate versus which isn't. Usually, this is because you can easily detect some of the anomalous behavior but not all of it. So you'll have some activity which is obviously anomalous, some which is obviously legitimate, and some which could be either. And sometimes when you've detected some that are obviously anomalous, most of the rest of the activity ends up being in the category of "could be either" with almost none left in the obviously legitimate. So from Google's point of view, I'm sure they ban the account so that they 1) don't end up paying a lot of money to users for the "could be either" activity, and 2) don't need to keep expending server resources continuously categorizing and serving the obviously anomalous traffic.
    • DFHippie 7y ago
      I'm sure this is right. You don't have enough statistical mass with any click by itself, but in the aggregate you can detect fraudulent activity with a high degree of certainty. Google's plan is to make it sufficiently expensive to avoid detection in the aggregate that selling fake clicks isn't a viable business proposition. The fraudsters have inverted the game: they can't beat Google's detection algorithms, so they can't sell you fake clicks, but they can sell you protection from their fake clicks. Google's move at this point seems to be lessening the punishment for fake clicks so it's still not economically viable to sell them but also not economically viable to use them as a threat.
• lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  Ok - so the search-space - all the things that are in the web - is a finite (!) space but also a "commons". If Google had not a private monopoly on the search space but it was a commonly / public held corpus - would this problem even exist? How would advertising work vs just searching?
  • duskwuff 7y ago
    This has nothing to do with search. This is an attack on site operators who are running Google ads, not on Google's own search ads.
• goatinaboat 7y ago
  How is this different from Google encouraging company A to out-bid company B for ads on B’s product names? Online advertising is inherently a racket.
• webjunkie01 7y ago
  Would it help if you get your site behind Cloudflare or similar?.
  • jrockway 7y ago
    They only need to request your site once, to get the ads that are served, then they can "click" them without visiting your site.
    • pier25 7y ago
      So like copying the ad embed code and pasting it in an HTML and the somehow spoofing the ip address?
      • pravda 7y ago
        I'd guess you would only have to spoof the REFERER. But I might be wrong.
• 0xff00ffee 7y ago
  "thousands of IP addresses" Naive question here, but this seems like a good starting point to combat this. Aren't some hijacked IPs "hotter" than others for spam activity? I would think that with Google's massive AdSense network, patterns would emerge from bot'ed IPs that are blasting away at various Google adsense customers, no?
  • AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    Botnet IP addresses have kind of a high churn rate. One person notices their computer is acting funny and gets it cleaned, another person gets newly infected. Somebody unknowingly has an infected laptop and they go plug it into a dozen different wifi networks over the course of a month, causing requests from a dozen different IP addresses that are each also shared by legitimate users. The result is that half the IP addresses on the internet have had bot traffic at one point or another, often at the same time as they have legitimate traffic.
  • paulgb 7y ago
    Yes, I suspect Google has a pretty good idea of what IPs are in botnets. I used to work on detecting fraud traffic at an adtech startup and the impressions we got through Google tended not to include the botnets I could identify coming through other ad networks. (Granted, this was near the beginning of last decade and it's a constantly-evolving cat-and-mouse game.)
• deckar01 7y ago
  > We hear a lot about the potential for sabotage, it’s extremely rare in practice, and we have built some safeguards in place to prevent sabotage from succeeding This wouldn't ring so hollow if Google didn't have such a reputation for blindly automating fraud detection. I seriously doubt it is actually possible to differentiate the two. The fraudulent activity that is visible to Google is the same regardless of the intention of the client that paid for it, be it a beneficiary or an adversary. Any signal that is deemed fraud by Google can eventually be simulated by an adversary.
• pier25 7y ago
  Jesus so how do you protect yourself against something like this?
  • mc3 7y ago
    Don't use Adsense for revenue.
    • pier25 7y ago
      What about other ad networks?
      • mc3 7y ago
        Maybe. The problem with ad networks is they don't pay well. Google is probably the best but still it's a pittance. I think the sweetspot for adsense is a site will millions of visitors who are not targeted for anything so adsense individually targets them for you. But if you have a site that is niche then you are better off finding a direct advertiser who will pay you more, and neither of you have to worry about getting banned or quality scores or all of that shit.
• gok 7y ago
  I've often suspected that some of the egregiously fake 5 star reviews I see on Amazon are really an attempt to get some seller banned.
• pier25 7y ago
  How do other ad networks deal with this? Eg: Carbon, AdThrive, MediaVine, etc.
• ping_pong 7y ago
  I 100% don't trust that Google can handle this situation. I actually hope that this practice increases drastically so that Google will be forced to do something about this. Because right now, Google will just ignore the problem and let small publishers and ad purchasers suffer. There is no real customer support so it will happen little by little and nothing will change. Google needs a swift, firm kick in the ass to fix this otherwise they will ignore it completely.
  • lonelappde 7y ago
    They could just stop serving to small publishers and purchasers? Would that make you happy?
    • thomasz 7y ago
      No, they should be regulated.
  • zadkey 7y ago
    I can't agree more. Google has some of the crappiest support around. A few lawsuits and some really bad publicity might make them change their tune.
    • Analemma_ 7y ago
      > A few lawsuits and some really bad publicity might make them change their tune. I'm not sure about that. Google's crappy support is deeply, deeply embedded in their culture -- for all the benefits, it's one of the downsides of their PhD-heavy, engineering-first mentality, because engineers and academics loathe dealing with people, and to the extent that it's necessary for some system, regard that as a sign that system was improperly designed. Google would need a major culture shift to start having good support, and unfortunately it's the exact kind of culture shift that would anger and alienate a lot of Googlers. Don't count on this changing anytime soon.
      • kunglao 7y ago
• busymom0 7y ago
  I think as well as several app developers using the AdMob sdk have been a victim of similar practice by malicious parties. 3 years ago, google suspended my admob account for fake activity even though I have never ever clicked on the ads nor did I use anything other than the test ad on my devices. This has happened to several developers and google doesn’t want to help. Back then, I got a 30 day suspension but since then, I have completely stopped using ads and solely rely on in app purchases. It’s less money but it’s at least reliable.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• whack 7y ago
  There seems to be an easy fix for this on Google's end. When their automated systems see fraudulent activity on a site, instead of banning it entirely, they can peg their future revenue to their historical revenue. This way, malicious publishers will have significantly limited incentive to engage in such behavior. In the short-term, their upside is heavily limited. And in the long-term, they risk being caught and banned. And at the same time, malicious blackmailers will also lose most of their leverage, like in the example given above. Even if the victim doesn't pay up, their income stream still remains mostly stable. And meanwhile, the attacker is spending a ton of resources on generating fake traffic that isn't earning them any money. This will eventually lead to the "business model" going extinct, which in itself solves the problem as well.
• amelius 7y ago
  Another bad usecase for bitcoin. I'm not sure if I'm still thrilled by cryptocurrencies. It seems to me that they are mostly wasting energy and helping criminals set up their businesses.
• pier25 7y ago
  What if browsers were able to somehow certify users as not bots? If that was ethically feasible it would be easy to block bots.
  • CraneWorm 7y ago
    I think there is more than one way to generate fraudulent traffic including click farms or Amazon Mechanical Turk. That the operator is a human does not entail the click is legitimate.
    • pier25 7y ago
      Good point, although since those clicks are much more expensive to produce than using bots I imagine its use will be more limited.
  • bryan_w 7y ago
    Unfortunately such a scheme is incompatible with privacy/anonymity.
• dpcan 7y ago
  When I ran a brick and mortar business, we ran Google Ads to get bookings, and we could always tell when our ads weren't running, met their budget, or were not running for some reason because our bookings would effectively drop to zero since 2 other companies had better organic SEO than us. THEN, one of our other competitors started outspending us a bit in Adwords. It hurt, but wasn't the end of the world because we could afford to spend just a little more. However, it seems that as soon as we went over a certain amount, our budgets started getting exceeded by about 10am in the morning. But our competitors ads kept going. We contacted Google to find out what was going on. None of these clicks were even resulting in business, contacts, nothing. So we assumed the worst, our competitor was having someone click all our ads. This process started the downward spiral for our business. Not being able to stay live in Adwords long enough to get any new business was devastating and I sure as heck wasn't going to participate in clicking on my competitors ads because that's fraud as far as I know. SO, we just suffered and I couldn't get any support from Google. In other news, the business has been closed for a year and Bing still lists it as open with photos, etc. We've tried marking it closed OVER AND OVER again and nothing is changing. We finally got on the phone to them and they actually said they can't change the search results. It's irritating to see a year old business open on Bing that's closed everywhere else.
  • Gibbon1 7y ago
    This brings up an unsatisfying conversation I had with an ex google person. I've worked in the embedded/industrial side of tech for most of my career. And the ratio of customer support vs the amount of money google is charging is utterly shit from my perspective. My friend tried to explain why it needs to be shit for vague security reasons but I'm unconvinced. Company collects thousands of dollars from customers and can't be bothered to give them a phone call when something goes sideways? Give me a break.
    • franczesko 7y ago
      Google support is non-existent. One of the reasons, why I stay away from Google Cloud.
• beloch 7y ago
  The kicker is that scammers could claim their own site is being attacked in this manner and then drive up their clicks with bots. Google's response necessarily has to include denying sites revenue for clicks they deem fraudulent. This scam basically gives Google justification to pay sites whatever they feel like paying as long as at least some of their clicks look fishy.
• Mistri 7y ago
  I have absolutely no faith that Google will be able to fix this. I run a small site that gets ~5K views per day, and a few weeks ago we had a heavy traffic day (~15K views in one day) due to a retweet on Twitter. Google marked it as fraud, and my account was "temporarily" banned. The ban never got lifted, so I did some research and finally got it resolved (if anyone's curious, I made a video detailing how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pCoBoK1hEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pCoBoK1hEM) If Google marked organic traffic as fraudulent, their algorithm has a long way to go before they can start distinguishing between sabotage and actually fraudulent traffic.
  • pier25 7y ago
    15K is not so much honestly... I would have expected this to happen on much higher numbers. Thanks for the video btw.
    • fiblye 7y ago
      It doesn't really happen to big companies because they have the power to sue. Every individual I know who's run google ads has been banned right before a payout at some point. They generally all in the range of $3000-6000. It's an amount that's a decent sum, but only to people who don't have deep enough pockets to afford a lawyer to go against a megacorp. I'm not convinced it's not intentional. The banned people probably aren't generating that much in profit for google, and seizing a few thousand dollars from a customer who's likely to just cancel services at some point probably has a better payoff after a certain threshold. No google employee will ever explain how it works and there's zero support, so I doubt my mind will ever be changed on this subject. One thing I do know is Google isn't a stupid company--just evil. The problem has been too consistently occurring and too consistently ignored that it can't just be incompetence. Say it's spam and show a couple suspicious figures if anyone really tries to investigate and you get off clean.
      • bcrosby95 7y ago
        Knowing Google they probably are using ML to maximize revenue, and the black box is causing the system to fuck little customers over. Oh well, it isn't fraud, they're just doing what the algorithm tells them to.
• m3kw9 7y ago
  This problem is similar to Amazons fake products. Gonna take long before it gets stamped out.
• scotty79 7y ago
  This scheme was literally first thing that came to my mind after I found out about what AdSense is. They pay for clicks > autoclicker! > they must detect this but can't detect all so they must punish severely > autocliker for people you don't like! It was I think more than a decade ago. Although I did not come up with extortion, just with harming your competition that relies on AdSense for revenue. Or a site you don't agree with. The risk was always there. EDIT I never implemented any sort of AdSense autoclicker to harm anybody or for any other purpose. Just noticed that it's trivial for somebody to harm any AdSense publisher.
• therealmarv 7y ago
  There are other industries where a similar attack could work. Just look at the new fintech banks: send suspicious transfers to an account and get their money blocked by their AI which monitors fraudulent transfers. Because this kind of banks have often too less humans checking and releasing blocking somebody could put a business and their bank account out of business. One famous example: Send a PayPal transaction with the word "bitcoin" to somebody. Your account (burned in the process) and the receivers account will get blocked. Welcome to the new AI world.
• elorant 7y ago
  This is known as "click bombing" and it's certainly not a new scheme. It has been around for ages, but I was under the impression that Google has mechanisms to analyze traffic and reject such clicks.
• rogual 7y ago
  I wonder how it feels to write one of these emails. Is it done with gleeful malevolence? Or just a dispassionate "I think this wording will yield the most revenue"?
  • fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    It probably depends on how experienced they are. I received daily extortion emails in my spam folder for many months, all related to the same breach (I think it was Yahoo). The wording kept changing all the time, going through lots of different sentiments and styles. So to me it looked like someone was trying to maximise returns in this particular case.
• onetimemanytime 7y ago
  >>Pay up or we’ll make Google ban your ads Pay up or we’ll make Google ban your site by buying you a gazillion backlinks for a few dollars. My site was harmed this way and any "guarantees" by that [withheld] Matt Cutts that no one could hurt your site were useless.
• rosybox 7y ago
  Google's invalid click contact form that Krebs links to says: > Please keep in mind that it's your responsibility to prevent invalid activity from occurring in your account, and this form does not absolve you of that responsibility. How is some random lay person running a wordpress site going to know how to prevent invalid activity when anyone could do this to them? I hate that corporate speak too about they can't comment and how they have tools, without addressing the concern people have. I resent how much power Google and Facebook have over small businesses that have an online presence. I hope the Justice Department takes a real good look at all this bullshit and breaks these giant, powerful companies up so that we end up with small companies, that care about their customers.
• triangleman 7y ago
  While I agree with others that Google should be able to deal with this by spending a small percentage of their revenue on better service, but probably won't... Is there any way a site owner could switch over to impression based ads from the ppc ads for a time?
• alfiedotwtf 7y ago
  I stopped reading Krebs when he started doxing people. You should too
• dannyr 7y ago
  This is just the consequence of tech monopolies. It's easier for bad people to blackmail you since they only have a few distribution channels to game or abuse. If your business get banned in one of these channels, then your business is screwed.
• justlexi93 7y ago
  As is par for pretty much all of these types of scams, the best solution is generally to ignore them entirely. They're all after the quick buck, and even if they could pull off an attack, it's easier to just move onto the next potential victim than bother with someone who may or may not even be paying attention.
• mirimir 7y ago
  Money quote from Google rep: > If there are concerns about invalid traffic, they should communicate that to us, and our Ad Traffic Quality team will monitor and evaluate their accounts as needed. Given all the comments here, and everything else I've read about Google having ~no human support, this is plainly bullshit.
• mcv 7y ago
  I would think Google could easily detect this and ban the IPs that the fraudelent clicks come from. Is this really something that works? And why doesn't Google stop it? It's hurting their primary industry.
• DrScientist 7y ago
  Advertising online is beginning to sound like the 'Law of Rent' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent ie when a resource is both essential and limited ( user attention in this case, land in the original case ) the person controlling that resource takes a share of the value generated by people using the resource that approaches break-even. ie all the profit. ie to put it another way - if you need customers and the only route is through Google, then you will have pay almost all your profits to Google for that attention.