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Comment by pja | Hacker News Reader

Say you don't agree with a particular site that's using adsense. You could (for instance) have you and all your friends click over and over again on the ads on that site, which Google will quickly flag as fraudulent.

Any site that attracts a large number of fraudulent clicks is going to get their AdSense account banned. The site owner has no recourse if this happens to them: they agreed to it when they signed up in the first place - Google can drop them for whatever reason they feel like at any time.

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Is it really that easy to put a gun to any random adsense user's head?

Yeah, it's called clickbombing: http://empireflippers.com/clickbombing-and-click-fraud/ (NB, Have no idea whether that's a reputable site, but the analysis in that blogpost is reasonably in depth).

If you're lucky, you catch it, report it to Google & they just take the income away (as it should be). If you're unlucky, Google decides that you're trying to defraud them & their ad clients and kills your entire AdSense account for all the sites you have registered with them. A scorched earth policy being the best possible policy apparently.

so far nobody has listed how they actually got in contact with google. Is there a certain email? method?

Only recourse that I have seen work is public shaming on a forum that someone high enough in Google notices (like mcutts).

Yeah, and guess what? You can "purchase" clicks and traffic in order to achieve this.

If you get on the tor network, you should be able to find a few places where you can pay (for example) a $100 for 30,000 views/clicks from a random country in the world to hit a site.

I'd imagine 30,000 false adsense clicks would do it.

Yes, I had it happen to me about 5-6 years ago. Fortunately I had some evidence at the time, and after weeks of trying, I got my account reinstated. But it is very easy to do and probably happens more often than people realize.

I have lost respect for Google in the sense that they are incapable of responding to people in a timely fashion on bans that could be potentially wrongful.

Yes.

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