My favorite story:

1. Dev publishes app with Google Admob integration to the Play Store.

2. Buys Google Ads to drive traffic to the app.

3. Google Admob bans his account for invalid traffic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_googl...

Same thing happened to us. We were large enough to have an admob rep who reached out to the IVT team for help. After our first appeal was rejected, our rep negotiated a second appeal attempt but he said “This time make sure you take full responsibility for the IVT getting through.

Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out.

We submitted a second appeal taking full responsibility plus providing a long list of corrective action we took in house plus a full triage of what happened.

They again rejected our second appeal with no feedback.

Why would you ever ever ever on record "take full responsibility" for something you did not actually do?

If a person does that, then that's dumb. But a company? Don't you have like a legal department or similar telling you to not ever confess to something you did in fact not do?

I doubt there were any damages — they were already refusing to pay us any payments we were owed.

I keep hearing this same story over and over. It's starting to sound like that's just Google's business model.

I keep hearing it too. The bit I don't yet understand is, wouldn't it be in Google's interest to not do this? They ban on both sides of the market for seemingly no reason. Wouldn't maximizing all legitimate participation be much better? Also seems a lot more possible to do now with AI to check all campaigns, landing pages, etc.

I imagine it's a side-effect of another fraud prevention effort. In my experience ad fraud on a google search ad is at least 17% of traffic, and potentially a lot more.

Whilst I don't doubt that Google invest heavily in fraud prevention, they're not actually succeeding.

Who benefits from the fraud, though?

Without the fraud prevention, it would be 99.9998%. Pushing it to 17% is impressive, even if not sufficient

Hypothetically you would have already paid for the ads before your account gets suspended/banned then hypothetically Google just keep sending you automated replies denying your requests for support until you give up or lawyer up. And when you consider the shear scale Google's adtech networks run at, this would add up fast and generate revenue over costs. Hypothetically