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Well I still don't understand why they banned me from AdSense and stole my money, at least this guy seems to know why ...

mistercow 14y ago
Did they accuse you of click fraud? That's what happened to me. Some research uncovered that all it really takes is one person who's angry at you to go on your site and click your ads repeatedly. If you search around, you can find stories of disgruntled readers, angry exes, you name it, and none of them have happy endings. If you knew the risk in advance, you could set up measures to prevent it, but of course those measures would be in violation of the AdSense TOS.
- conradfr 14y ago
  They just said it was "at risk to generate fraudulent activity" (loose translation). But AdSense was deactivated for years on my website, and there was like 20€ sitting on it (which was too low to be transfered). Oh well, I will use something else for my upcoming real websites.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    >They just said it was "at risk to generate fraudulent activity" (loose translation). Wow, so they didn't even accuse you of fraud... just "pre-fraud". It's especially funny since every active AdSense account is one malicious visitor away from "fraudulent activity". I'm not sure how you can be more "at risk" than that.
    - gizzlon 14y ago
      Any one else reminded of Minority Report? The google precogs found you guilty of future crime..
    - joshuahedlund 14y ago
      > one malicious visitor away from "fraudulent activity" I worry sometimes about the potential for malicious drive-bys. I've thought about trying to set up some code that registers when someone clicks on an ad and and then shows a non-ad in its place for the next X page loads to try to prevent that sort of thing. Not sure if it would work, though.
      - mistercow 14y ago
        As I mentioned a few comments up, I don't think you can implement a countermeasure like that without violating the TOS. And even if you were technically in the right, you'd be right back in the situation of automated bots thinking you were up to something fishy and banning you.
        d0de 14y ago
        Which part of the TOS do you think this would violate? AFAIK you're not under any obligations to show Adsense ads to all users, or all of the time. I know quite a few people who only show Adsense ads to search engine visitors, for example, or block ads for people arriving with certain referrers. This seems like a similar move.
  - codexon 14y ago
    Same thing happened to us. Except they cut us off the 2nd time we got over the minimum payout threshold. They asked for logs when we were using Google Analytics...

mistercow 14y ago

Did they accuse you of click fraud? That's what happened to me. Some research uncovered that all it really takes is one person who's angry at you to go on your site and click your ads repeatedly. If you search around, you can find stories of disgruntled readers, angry exes, you name it, and none of them have happy endings. If you knew the risk in advance, you could set up measures to prevent it, but of course those measures would be in violation of the AdSense TOS.

conradfr 14y ago
They just said it was "at risk to generate fraudulent activity" (loose translation). But AdSense was deactivated for years on my website, and there was like 20€ sitting on it (which was too low to be transfered). Oh well, I will use something else for my upcoming real websites.
- mistercow 14y ago
  >They just said it was "at risk to generate fraudulent activity" (loose translation). Wow, so they didn't even accuse you of fraud... just "pre-fraud". It's especially funny since every active AdSense account is one malicious visitor away from "fraudulent activity". I'm not sure how you can be more "at risk" than that.
  - gizzlon 14y ago
    Any one else reminded of Minority Report? The google precogs found you guilty of future crime..
  - joshuahedlund 14y ago
    > one malicious visitor away from "fraudulent activity" I worry sometimes about the potential for malicious drive-bys. I've thought about trying to set up some code that registers when someone clicks on an ad and and then shows a non-ad in its place for the next X page loads to try to prevent that sort of thing. Not sure if it would work, though.
    - mistercow 14y ago
      As I mentioned a few comments up, I don't think you can implement a countermeasure like that without violating the TOS. And even if you were technically in the right, you'd be right back in the situation of automated bots thinking you were up to something fishy and banning you.
      - d0de 14y ago
        Which part of the TOS do you think this would violate? AFAIK you're not under any obligations to show Adsense ads to all users, or all of the time. I know quite a few people who only show Adsense ads to search engine visitors, for example, or block ads for people arriving with certain referrers. This seems like a similar move.
- codexon 14y ago
  Same thing happened to us. Except they cut us off the 2nd time we got over the minimum payout threshold. They asked for logs when we were using Google Analytics...