The way to avoid wasting money like this is to ramp up your spending gradually using what's called 'discovery campaigns.' This is a risk management method that

The way to avoid wasting money like this is to ramp up your spending gradually using what's called 'discovery campaigns.' This is a risk management method that helps you to avoid the shittiest publishers (which is almost all of them). If you had done this you could have avoided this unhappy incident. You can also bypass discovery campaigns by just running managed placements, which means whitelisting certain publishers only. Google does a disservice to its customers by making it seem like 'anyone' who can paste an image into its tool can advertise effectively. Technically, yes, it's so easy that even a greedy pigeon with a corporate credit card can do it. Practically, in many if not most verticals, it takes reading at least a couple textbooks worth of material to be effective, plus creative experience. Google is not being shady in this instance. The only shady thing that it is doing is using its marketing to delude people with large enough budgets to hurt themselves into managing their own campaigns. Another issue highlighted in this post that many professional advertisers complain about is that over the last few years, Google has tried to frogmarch desktop advertisers into tablet/mobile advertising, whereas it requires more finesse and planning to tailor campaigns to those devices than most clients are interested in using.