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"?