My experience with suspicious Adsense activity.

And how Google/Adsense responded.

[Broadway]

I guess this is common knowledge, just something that is new to me.

I have a small site (small adsense money) that experienced a day where earnings and ctr were (in just a half day) over 10 times what the typical day's stats would be expected to be.

I took Adsense off the site, but probably a few hours after the event occurred (although I really don't know).

I reported to Adsense by email.

Adsense replied that I could go ahead and put the Adsense ads back up, which I did a few days later. They didn't mention anything in their email about investigating the situation.

The Adsense activity on my site returned to normal.

About a week later I got email from Adsense saying they had investigated and that they would discount the earnings for the activity they felt was fradulent (from just that one day).

Life goes on. All seems well (expect for the fact that this stinking site is sandboxed).

[ronburk]

It would be so interesting to know whether, if you hadn't reported it to Google, Google would have sent you a warning letter, suspended your account, or just simply have done nothing.

It's the uncertainty about the click-fraud situation that is so damaging, not the actual odds of getting terminated.

[malachite]

It would be so interesting to know whether, if you hadn't reported it to Google, Google would have sent you a warning letter, suspended your account, or just simply have done nothing.

Indeed. However it's at least encouraging to see Google does deal fairly with honest publishers who take a pro-active approach to possible click-fraud.

[Andrew Bassett]

This is the ONLY sensible way to deal with these problems. It's why I check my stats every day, even though I can go weeks without a click.

[thaidomain]

This is not a simple issue. Just a few months back I created channels for tens of my individual pages. After doing so, I observed that it is fairly common for the CTR of individual pages to be very high, sometimes a 100%. [on pages that do not get a lot of visitors]. I can imagine that mostly these clicks are genuine. When searching for something, I myself sometimes go back and forth and click on multiple advertisements. I would be very counterproductive to each time inform Google and/or remove the ads on the page.
CTR extremely high on a whole website is of course another matter. What I want to stress is, if you do not have the date, you do not know. I was not aware of it (I ran adsense for 2 years before putting channels for a lot of individual pages) until I created the channels.

[danimal]

the ctr can go thru the roof if people are right-clicking on the ads, and opening 'em up in a new browser window.

but since google did confirm your questions about fraudulent traffic, i'd say that you handled it right... nice catch!