Hypothetical: Killing a competitor's adsense account

[Just_Bob]

A Hypothetical situation:

Assume that I have a site without adsense but I have a close competitor who does have adsense on his site. What is to stop me from mounting a campaign of clicking on the ads on my competitor's site (the code is easy to write) so that it looks like click fraud?

It seems like it would be easy to make it look like my competitor is committing click fraud so that Google locks up his money & cancels his adsense account.

Has anybody heard of this happening? Or does Google have some protection against this?

Thanks,

Bob

[Rodney]

This has happened to members of this forum and Google seemed to be smart enough to catch it and didn't punish the publisher being attacked.

[ownerrim]

Bob, the scenario you cite is so incredibly obvious, and was surely obvious to Google from the time these programs were in their planning stages on the drawing board.

[fischermx]

Nothing stops you.

But it is not too easy, now you gonna fake it is fraud, that changes the view.

If you're too obvious, they will get it and discard your clicks, not blaming the adsense publisher for doing click fraud.

I wouldn't do it anyway.

[europeforvisitors]

Since most people who engage in such clicking are likely to be too dimwitted to cover their tracks, it wouldn't be that hard for Google to track the clicks back to the offending publisher (via cookies or whatever) and terminate the offender's account. And why not? Fraud is fraud, whether it's intended to benefit the clicker or to hurt someone else.