A new fraud threatens AdSense accounts, and Google is ready to confront it

Some search engine enthusiasts have long threatened the owners of major websites to launch attacks that flood their advertisements on their sites with visits, but even if they do that, Google monitors those visits and proceeds to ignore them, and the attack ends without closing the site owner’s account. Well, it seems that one of them decided to take advantage of this not by knocking down competitors for a specific keyword, but by blackmailing them via email. The email-based extortion scheme targeting website owners who run banner ads through Google's AdSense program demands payments in Bitcoin in exchange for a promise not to flood the publisher's ads with unwanted traffic.

Google's automated anti-fraud systems suspend a user's AdSense account due to suspicious traffic. An automated email sent to publishers that began appearing as a notice in their AdSense account dashboard warned of the extortionists' plans to flood the site with "a massive amount of web traffic generated by bots and thousands of IP addresses in rotation." Google constantly monitors invalid traffic, clicks or impressions resulting from publishers clicking on their live ads, as well as fake automated clickthroughs or bots.

In August 2019, the American company announced the ability to improve the recognition of potentially invalid traffic. Observers and publishers are calling on the search giant to find solutions to this problem and avoid closing the accounts of publishers who are under attack.