Dissatisfied Customer Threatened us with Click Attacks

[James M Omakovich]

We received numerous threats from one dissatisfied customer whom we refused to issue "full refund". He used our services for 2 weeks, and our full refund policy is applicable only within 1st week. We are consulting company and we simply can't offer full month of services for free. Our refund policy is clearly stated on our site. I went one step further and issued 50% refund and he was still unreasonably dissatisfied. Then he started sending numerous emails with foul words and threats that he will click attack us. As a result, we removed Google ads on March 1st from our website and contacted Becky, Google Adsense employee. We explained her the situation we are in and she told us they will monitor the site and she noted the incident in our account, and today we received email from [e-mail] stating our site was disabled, but we do have a right to appeal.

I appealed immediately, pointed out to my conversations with Becky (Adsense Support), pointed out to threats that we received, and told them that we were the ones who originally reported possible illegal click activity coming from threats that we received. We even removed ads to protect ourselves and even contacted Google. We acted in good faith. Now, our ban is under appeal, and I hope we get our company's account back. We have 25 full time employees (19 full time, 6 part time) and we also opened another office in Surrey, BC (our main office is in Vancouver). To prevent possible clicks by employees, we used OpenAds and blocked our local networks' IP addresses.

I hate to say this, but I am totally disgusted at how easy it is for competitors or/and dissatisfied customers to hijack other company's publisher account. It's not Google's fault as much as it is fault of the system under which pay per click advertising and publishing operates. Think about it - what can prevent mean individual to click your ads 1000s of times or even to possibly spam your website link on adult forums? If you do research by googleing these issues, you will learn that many such cases have been reported.

Edit Reason: Spelling

[edited by: James_M_Omakovich at 1:12 am (utc) on Mar. 13, 2007]

[jatar_k]

2 wrongs don't make a right

and the assumption that the OP was in the wrong is unfounded

[trinorthlighting]

Good thing you followed advice for the criminal side of things. Hope its a wake up call so publishers know how to handle issues in the future.