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Comment by mayank | Hacker News Reader

> But instructing your visitors in some way to click on your ads does cross the line.

If you think that crosses the line, then you just gave anyone with access to a small botnet (or who knows how to cleverly use Tor) an easy, cheap way to cut off the income of people who rely on AdSense. And there are a LOT of those.

Outright, criminal fraud is one thing, but I would argue that it's unethical to hold up the funds he has already accrued. Sure, cut him off, but perhaps it's not the best idea to rely on the good intentions of people when you offer cash for clicks.

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There's a difference between:

1) fraudulent clicks that could be generated by a botnet

2) instructions on the site itself that you have control over telling your visitors to click on ads to make you more money.

I don't want to come across as defending google on this. They could use a lot more hands on customer service. This sort of sudden termination is scary and sucks. I'm just pointing out, there is unjustified termination (which also happens) and termination based on willful fraud.

Mind you Google never told the guy what happened so he could properly defend himself or correct the problem

He knows what he did was wrong. He admits as much in his magnum opus. Just not wrong enough to be banned from AdSense.

I know he's wrong and I know exactly what he did wrong: he enticed visitors to his website to click on ads so that he makes more money at the expense of advertisers. You cannot do it for reasons that are both obvious and clearly speelled in AdSense agreement.

He is unwilling to correct the problem. He's even unwilling to admit there is a problem - his whole argument to favor theory of cruel and unusual treatment from Google is based on his fundamental belief that he really did nothing wrong. Plus irrelevant personal details designed to trigger sympathy for him, as a person, and detract attention away from the facts of what he did.

> If you think that crosses the line, then you just gave anyone with access to a small botnet (or who knows how to cleverly use Tor) an easy, cheap way to cut off the income of people who rely on AdSense. And there are a LOT of those.

No, he didn't. A "small botnet" or Tor is not particularly useful to force you to violate the Adsense ToS by telling your visitors to click on your ads.

I think his point is that, if invalid clicks is all it takes for an adsense publisher to get banned, then there is nothing to stop your competition from going onto your site and clicking a lot of your ads or get a botnet to do it and get you banned.

If it is a mere algorithm, then it is not unforeseeable, that, due to no fault of your own whatever, but malice of competitors, you can get banned, though, in these cases, I think there would be a good legal argument, not least because the google contract you sign up to is not entirely recognised by some courts, but replaced in many instances by what is or seems reasonable, as, when you sign up to the contract you have no choice but to sign up, thus, there is no equal bargaining power.

Except in that particular case that's not what happened. He admits he was enticing users to click ads which is clearly against AdSense rules.

I'm sure the fraud detection system is not perfect but in this case it actually worked as designed. Yay for Google, boo for people who try to take advantage of the system.

I wonder if the money is withheld because it'll be returned to the advertisers - or whether Google actually keeps it. I'd be surprised if Google charged the advertisers for traffic that it detected to be fraudulent.

Google says it's returned to the advertisers.

I've had money refunded automatically due to Google detecting fraud later.

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