i had an account with google adsense. 3 weeks into the program... some weird thing happened to my site. clicks went up (without real advertisement), i started to earn like $50 in my account. then one day, google just shut down my site citing illegitimate activities. i emailed them and complaint about it because i simply wasn't aware any wrong doing ... asked them to explain. they told me that they don't need to explain to me for shutting down the account and told me to read the agreement. i am wondering if they can run up the charges on their clients and then terminate the source without properly crediting them back to the client that they charged on my behalf. anyway, i think Google is running a scam and i am a bit afraid of their program. but if anyone has good success with their adsense, please let me know i would like to learn from you.

When you saw the clicks going up, you should have emailed Google and told them about it. Someone might have been deliberately clicking your ads to deliberately shut down your account, which isn't your fault, but it's still your responsibility to report all suspicious activity to Google. If they find it themselves, they assume that it was you comitting the fraud, and shut down your account.

I agree with you that Google's policy of shutting down accounts (and refusing to re-instate them) is somewhat flawed, but to call them a scam is a bit much. They are trying to take drastic steps to protect their advertisers, and prevent click fraud. If they didn't do this, advertisers would probably be calling them a "scam".

The problem is that if they do that to every account without warning, then wouldn't you call that a scam? I emailed them and tried to explain it and even asked not to have money received. Think about it. They owed me $40 and they shut down the site, so where did this money go? they pocketed it and took away from their advertisers. How in the world do you think that they are making billions, by being honest??? obviously not.

Originally Posted by teknorhino

The problem is that if they do that to every account without warning, then wouldn't you call that a scam? I emailed them and tried to explain it and even asked not to have money received. Think about it. They owed me $40 and they shut down the site, so where did this money go? they pocketed it and took away from their advertisers. How in the world do you think that they are making billions, by being honest??? obviously not.

I'm afraid I have to agree with you Teknohino. Google owes me $5000 from two months of advertizements. I sent them more than 25,000 clicks. Yes, that's 25,000. More than 1,250,000 impressions. Yes again that number is correct, then they canceled my account.

I wonder if there is a single website where people can all collect just how much money Google has defaulted on webmasters... hmmm...

The problem is that if they do that to every account without warning, then wouldn't you call that a scam?

I'd call it stupidity. What sort of business model would that be - shutting down your own income streams?

We get a 5-figure sum from Google each month and are generally happy. We're concious of not relying too heavily on this because of the "fragility" of their TOS, so work hard to keep other income streams around the same level.

I personally don't agree with terminating agreements without explanation or comeback, but I think it is done more for efficiency that dishonesty.

IMO, you could get your adsense account back by confessing any time with polite and honest request in written mail where you did something against TOS. You should also quote precaution actions and measures you are going to take to avoid this from again happening later on like click monitoring software get into application or blocking certain IP addresses. I think you should not just send bundle of emails as it might be consider as spam. IMO, you should always use alternative to adsense like clicksor, fastclick or adbrite along with it if in any case you got banned, you will have one source of revenue running continuously.