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Comment by mistercow | Hacker News Reader

This is actually an incredibly common practice of Google's, although in most cases they only make off with a few hundred dollars of ad revenue. I personally had it happen to me with a blog. They accused me a of "click fraud", disabled my account, and disappeared with the money they owed me. I did some research and found the same story repeated dozens of times. This has been going on for years.

Basically, Google's policies mean that if you don't like a website which uses AdSense for revenue, you can screw over the owner by sitting at their site and repeatedly clicking their ads. Google will see the "fraud", assume it was the site owner doing it, and shut down their account with little to no opportunity for appeal.

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The second paragraph seems like something one could test. Have you?

Fraud detection is just hard. And my expectation is that for every legitimate friendly fire instance there are six or ten "marginal fraudsters" trying to spin their troubles with Google via blog posts like the one in the link.

I clicked on this thinking it would be a clear case of Google doing something "evil", and had to read through very carefully before I figured out that it was just another account freeze. Meh. If it's seriously $40k, then sue them and figure out what really happened in discovery. That would be a blog post I'd want to read.

>The second paragraph seems like something one could test.

I do not think it would be ethical to test it directly. But you don't have to search far to find people who have had their accounts crashed by angry exes.

>a clear case of Google doing something "evil" //

Using $40k of a service (ad space in this instance) and then refusing to return the service providers calls and emails for over 12 months may not be "evil" per se but it's certainly on the malevolent side.

If it ruined someone’s livelihood then I'd say it's getting to be in the locus of what could well be described as "evil".

For a company to do this without apology demonstrates a pretty serious ethical deficit (assuming we have the full story before us).

You're taking the linked post on an awful lot of (IMHO, unverifiable and undeserved) faith. Yes, if everything they say is true, Google are jerks at best. But a blog post does not a reputation for honesty make, sorry. Even PayPal doesn't hit verifiably honest saints more than one a year or so.

Look, I don't know anything about "hatchlings", I'm just saying I'm not going to believe a post like this prima facie. They look like a garden variety spammy facebook game to me. That's a market pretty well known for playing SEO games and gaming ad systems.

Are these guys guilty or not? No idea. Fight it out, get some evidence, and then come to the public for support.

I agree that you shouldn't just take us at our word (and that's why we included as much documentation as we could to support our case).

But it would make it a heck of a lot easier to defend ourselves if Google had actually accused us of doing something wrong. To this day we're not even sure what we're alleged to have done to get our account banned.

There's no reason to think the story isn't true either. This is exactly the same scenario thousands have experienced over the years. Google sends the first automated e-mail, the user appeals, then gets a second canned response from Google. I don't think the wording of either email has even changed for years. Just look at how many others who have just posted here have had similar experiences. Look around the internet a bit and you will see that the number of people suddenly banned from adsense for life then stonewalled by Google is HUGE.

Also, something incredible is that there are measures to take to disable this ability for saboteurs.

Scripting that will only display the adsense advertisement once per IP visiting your site... yet guess what, Google disallows this practice!

This may not be a great solution to combat click fraud, but could google just limit the payout to 1 click per IP per website per day?

You would think, but I think they have always felt that a "tough on crime" mentality was necessary to inspire confidence in advertisers. This is a direct result of the imbalance of clout implicit to the long-tail/short-tail dichotomy of AdSense; Google packages a (relative) many dime-a-dozen content creators into a product (commodified ad space) which they sell to a (relative) few customers (advertisers). In addition, they can bet on content creators seeing the risk as low stakes (even though getting banned from a monopolistic ad network is anything but low stakes), while they can bank on advertisers seeing the risk as high stakes (which it is).

A better solution is not to use cost-per-click in the first place, instead relying on metrics that are harder to game, like unique visitors and page views. These are arguably a better reflection of an advertising space's value even without taking click fraud into account. That's what Project Wonderful did, and it has worked out well for some of its users, but its model is also more long-tail/long-tail, which I think hurts its profitability.

>instead relying on metrics that are harder to game, like unique visitors and page views. //

Surely page views are as easy to imitate as clicks (possibly easier). Unique visitors would be reasonably easy to game as well I'd imagine.

The reason that page views and unique views are harder to game is that they worth far less individually, while not being correspondingly easier to produce.

Say I'm a fraudster with a thousand IPs and a well-anonymized browser. If I'm paid per click, I can easily turn that into a thousand apparently legitimate clicks, which, depending on how I play my cards, could net me a few hundred dollars.

By contrast, if I'm paid per unique visitor, I can turn that into a thousand apparently legitimate unique visitors, which will very optimistically pull in maybe $5 (judging by Project Wonderful).

Now, neither of those schemes are optimal, but just about any improvement you suggest for the unique visitor model will reap ten times the rewards applied to the per-click model.

Proxies ruin this idea. There are entire ISPs whose web traffic originates from a handful of IPs.

also, they are sure they are on the winning side. my understanding is that in most court proceedings, the winning side has the right to be fully reimbursed for legal costs occurred up to a reasonable point.

In the United States that's not normally the case; the "American rule" is that each side pays their own court costs, regardless of outcome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fee...). There are specific statutory exceptions for certain kinds of lawsuits, such as Title VII claims and copyright cases.

Not in the U.S. The winner is entitled to legal fees from the user only extraordinary circumstances (i.e., where punitive damages or sanctions are also appropriate) or in family law cases (i.e., divorces).

Take them to a small claims court for damages (money, plus wasted hours dealing with it at your hourly rate). They will probably send some clueless legal intern without any proof.

Businesses can only sue for up to $5,000 in (CA) small claims court. $40,000 would have to go to real court, lawyers and all.

They actually have a page to report click fraud on your own account:

https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/request.py?&conta...

>Please keep in mind that it's your responsibility to prevent invalid activity from occurring in your account, and this form does not absolve you of that responsibility.

Perfect. So it's your responsibility to prevent invalid clicks, even though pretty much any way you can think of to prevent them is explicitly forbidden by the TOS, but if someone does click your ads a bunch of times, let us know so we can steal all the money you've earned in the last month and shut you down.

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