The publisher will always claim it is not fraud no matter what level of investigation Google performs. And Google only refunds the portion of the earnings that

The publisher will always claim it is not fraud no matter what level of investigation Google performs. And Google only refunds the portion of the earnings that they find to be in violation. This to me, as a business owner, seems logical when looking at it from Google's point of view. If I owned Adsense, I can't imagine doing it any differently or more fairly when having to consider both the paying advertiser and the warning publisher. Those two parties will never agree if they were in direct contact so Google has to be the middle man and play the bad guy to at least one of them. Hacker News patrons would be equally up in arms if the article was about AdWORDS paid ads that a small website owner found to be fake clicks, paid money for, asked for a refund, was refused, and wrote a blog about. Google really can't win.