Interesting. It seems like a ToS violation would have been worthy of a warning and revoking the offending earnings, but nope, it was no mercy or review.
OP isn't the good guy in this story. Them breaking a very basic, clearly worded rule assisted in fraud. Of course they deserve to be banned from the network if they can't even follow that rule.
Also all the other people in this story complaining about their rates falling off a cliff can blame people like OP who place ads in places they shouldn't leading to low quality traffic. No one wants to buy network ads if they have quality anymore.
The scummy behaviour is agreeing to only put the ads on content pages then immediately putting them on search result pages to attempt to extract more money from advertisers.
I feel like you're not quite understanding the level of fraud in advertising. There is a reason all the networks are quick to fire publishers/affiliates because the ones that aren't go broke paying out for fraud.
No one owes anything to someone that tried to scam them out of money. I also don't send replies to every phishing attempt explaining why I'm blocking their email.
Go click on new with readdead enabled. Do you believe HN owes every banned spammer an explanation on why their account was banned?