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-Typing this on a Nexus-

I'm pretty sure that this is not what Google wants although they might -as you correctly point out- profit from it in the first place. But the negative publicity in combination with possibly loosing companies buying ad space on Google because of fake clicks can not be worth it. Google is too big to profit from a scam like this in the long-term.

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I agree, and like you, I doubt fake clicks/impressions have an impact on Google's revenue.

Still, one has to wonder how one arm of the company can be so successful at creating artificial intelligence (smart cars, tensor flow, deep dream, just OTOH), while the other - its primary revenue driver, at that - manages to overlook things that are so simple.

Or am I really expecting it to be much more difficult than simple heuristics like "game + SMS privileges = fishy"?

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