Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Nothing to stop anyone doing it at all. However, place your trust in the google gods because they know everything.
what are they to stop someone from clicking on my ad google everyday to try to get me banned?
Mainly just fear that Google will identify who is doing it and ban them instead. Otherwise, it's hard to see much of an obstacle. I haven't heard of any cases in which anyone was prosecuted for deliberately clicking on ads that ultimately send money to someone else.
It would be kinda like trying to prosecute Company A for making a concerted effort to acquire and use as many coupons as possible belonging to Company B in order to hurt their bottom line. It's malicious intent, but using an entirely legal and widely known mechanism. Doesn't mean Company A couldn't get sued, but winning is far from certain.
OTOH, Google has to deal with click fraud all the time, so it's unlikely a Bad Guy can get you banned by sitting at one PC and just clicking your ads over and over again. It would be just nuts for Google to be so naive as to be unable to detect and eliminate that kind of fraud (although, I can attest that they don't detect and eliminate all obvious fraud automatically in real time, as I saw one of my AdWords ads get a nearly 100% CTR via Google Search for a matter of days with no intervention from Google until I filed a fraud report and got my money back).
Google claims an honest publisher who pays attention to the Terms and Conditions is highly unlikely to have anything to fear. I suspect that is, statistically speaking, probably correct. But I would add that I think it's prudent for anybody relying on AdSense for income to have their own anti-fraud detection measures in place so that they can immediately report anything suspicious to Google.